280059 - Printing clips text at right margin

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[mozilla3eran]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041111 Firefox/1.0 Mnenhy/0.7.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041111 Firefox/1.0 Mnenhy/0.7.1

Printing tries to print lines that are too long (given the page width and font
size). This results in the text being clipped at the right margin. 


Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Type the following text into a new plain-text message as a lonm line (no
linebreaks):
a2345678 b2345678 c2345678 d2345678 e2345678 f2345678 g2345678 h2345678 i2345678
j2345678 k2345678 l2345678 m2345678 n2345678 o2345678 p2345678 q2345678 r2345678
s2345678 t2345678 u2345678 v2345678 w2345678 x2345678 y2345678 z2345678

2. Save the message as draft.

3. Locate the message in the Drafts folder, and print it to a file using a
PostScript driver and A4 page size.

4. View the resulting PostScript file.

5. Compare it to the Print Preview.
Actual Results:  
There is clipped text at the right margin in the printout, though not in the
print preview.

Expected Results:  
The whole text should be shown, and the printout should be identical to the
print preview.

The problem seems to be sensitive to many parameters: Thunderbird version, page
size, font, and perhaps printer driver. For messages with long lines, the
clipping occurs for most but not all choices of these settings, and at different
places. For example, the above message prints OK with the "PostScript/Default"
printer using Letter paper, but not A4.

Applies both to printing to PS files and print to a CUPS printer.
Appears to be independent of the setting of "Shring to Fit Page Width".
Tested on Thunderbird 1.0 (RedHat FC3 RPM) and trunk nightly build 2005-01-20,
both on Fedora Core 3.

Attached is an example of raw message, PostScript output, and Print Preview
screenshot demonstrating the problem. Taken with Thunderbird nightly build
2005-01-20 on Fedora Core 3.

Comment 1

[mozilla3eran]

Attachment: Testcase + output

Use A4 paper size when printing.

Comment 2

[Warren]

I saw this problem in 1.0 and into version 1.0.1 (20050223) aviary 1.0.1 (did
not test with pre 1.0).  I have tested various alterations with visible changes
but nothing to fix the clipping.  I have also to add that URL's do not format
well with preceding text.  The URL's in the body will overlap ~ 4-9 characters
back making it very difficult to read.  Underlining is short ~ 7 characters in a
31 character URL.  These problems are notably for plain text email.  This is a
totally different story for html formatted email.  Only the underlined URL in
the body is still there.  All header URL's are correctly displayed; text/html.
Word wrapping is not the same when compared to the print preview but no clipping
occurs in html.

Comment 3

[Warren]

This IS only found in Linux but I have not confirmed on other Linux boxen. 
Tested on XP fine.

Comment 4

[Simon Waldman]

I can confirm this happening for me too : Tbird 1.0, Mandrake 10.1 (using xfs
for fonts, I think, if that matters).
I *think* (not sure) that it only happens with text that Tbird is flowing. If
there are hard line breaks then this never occurs.

If I can provide any other info that may help to solve this, please email me and
I'll do all that I can to help. At present I'm having to copy and paste emails
to OpenOffice to print them!

Comment 5

[mjc]

I have been seeing this same problem using the thunderbird-0.9-1.fc3 and
thunderbird-1.0-2 Fedora RPMs (FC3). No juggling of settings seems to fix it. No
problems observed under Windows 2000, however.

Comment 6

[mjc]

Apparently this only happens for plain text messages using the fixed width font.
The workaround is to set the Plain Text Messages settings in
Edit>Options>Display to Variable Width font. This screws up formatting, but it
prints.

See http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=232221 for details.

This bug is also in the Redhat bugzilla at
http://bugzilla.redhat.com/beta/show_bug.cgi?id=140197.

Comment 7

[Aleksey Nogin]

I see this with 1.0 on Fedora Core 3 as well.

Comment 8

[Aleksey Nogin]

It appers that this problem is because of faulty fonts, not because of a bug in
TBird. After I've installed a urw-fonts update for FC3 today, the problem went
away! In fact, if I print to a PS file from TBird, then that PS file looks OK on
an upgraded FC3, but still looks wrong on a FC3 with old urw-fonts package. See
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=140584 for more information.