333915 - Files with many pages and large font print incompletely

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Core :: Printing: Output, defect)

Description

[tom chester]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060111 Firefox/1.5.0.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060111 Firefox/1.5.0.1

Some files with large font sizes (using <h3> for all text) and many pages display properly in print preview, but only actually print a small fraction of the pages.  The problem is reproducible for a given file, but don't happen for all files.

For example, this page displays 19 pages in print preview, but only 5 pages actually get printed:

http://tchester.org/srp/plants/guides/n_tp_big_print.html

The incomplete printout in this case has the first 4 pages correct, but the fifth page includes at the bottom the first few lines from the print preview of the sixth page, and the very bottom of the 19th page is overprinted on this.  So it is missing all of pages 6-19 except for those few lines.

I thought at first this was a problem with clickbook, but the blue squirrel clickbook technical support staff verified it was a problem with firefox 1.5 on their computer.  They stated it did not happen with firefox v1.4 on their computer.

The above webpage does not have a problem printing using IE 6.0.xxx, but neither does IE use as large a font size with the <h3> font.

I also tried closing all the <h3> tags in the file, and it didn't make any difference except, oddly, to make the print preview 21 pages instead of 19 pages.  The printout was still 5 pages.

If i remove the <h3> tags and use a default smaller font size, the page prints properly.

See below for a possible interaction between firefox and clickbook that might be causing this bug.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.  load http://tchester.org/srp/plants/guides/n_tp_big_print.html
2.  file - print preview shows 19 pages
3.  file - print prints only 5 pages
note: one may need to have clickbook installed on one's system to reproduce this.  see below.
Actual Results:  
Only 5 of 19 pages printed

Expected Results:  
19 of 19 pages printed

New Dell pc; win xp updated with all latest critical updates; word 97 and excel 97 installed; blue squirrel clickbook v.9 installed; macafee security center and virus scanning program installed by dell.

I have not tried this in a system without clickbook v.9 installed, because i can't!  clickbook definitely interacts with file handling.  for example, when i uninstalled clickbook, firefox will only "print" and "print preview" pages in landscape mode.  it will accept changes in preferences, but won't actually act on them.

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

do you see this issue still with version 3.6 or 4.0 beta?

Comment 2

[tom chester]

Yep, I just tried it, using the "steps to reproduce" above, and I only see 8 pages in the "print preview" screen.

I'm using Firefox 3.6.13.

Comment 3

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

print preview is 5 pages for me using today's 4.0 trunk build on vista
but physical print is 10 pages, and it's a mess.

similar to Bug 635768 which I just filed.

Comment 4

[chbok]

I just notice this troubleshooting on my job version (45.2.0).
I also tried to create a pdfcreator file, and this file was truncated whith only 14 pages. In fact, i noticed that the table was truncated because the end of html appears ("... Updated 9 April 2006.").

Comment 5

[Andrei Purice]

Marking this as Resolved > Worksforme since the issue no longer is reproducible on the latest versions of Firefox Nightly 95.0a1 (2021-10-22), beta 94.0b9 or release 93.0 on Windows 10. Print preview shows all 19 pages and all of them are printed as well.
If anyone can still reproduce the issue either re-open it or file a new one.