376653 - Add ability to put custom text in the page header (not e-mail headers) when printing

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 475707

(Thunderbird :: General, enhancement)

Description

[jonesey]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8.0.11) Gecko/20070312 Firefox/1.5.0.11
Build Identifier: version 1.5 (20051201)

Important note: This request refers to headers and footers on the printed pages of printed e-mail messages.  At no time am I referring to the headers of the e-mail messages themselves (i.e. From, To, Subject, etc.).

My customers sometimes print e-mail messages to a shared printer.  If the message was sent to a list (e.g. all-faculty@lists), there is no way to tell who printed the message to the printer.  Many e-mail programs will add a message like "printed for [e-mail]" to the header or the footer of the printed page.

This bug fix/enhancement request is for the ability to place custom text, such as the customer's name, in one or more of the following variables:
print.print_[header|footer][left|center|right]

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Go to Thunderbird -> Prefs -> Advanced -> General.
2. Click on Config Editor
3. Type "print" to get all of the print variables.
4. Put custom text in one of the header or footer variables, like print.print_headerleft.
5. Print an e-mail message.  Note that your custom text does not appear on the printed document.
Actual Results:  
It's possible that I'm doing something wrong, but the steps above sure look like the way to do what I want. 

Expected Results:  
Custom text appears on the printed page in the header (the page header, NOT the e-mail headers).

I don't know if this should be classified as a bug fix or an enhancement request.  It depends on what the intent of the print.print* variables was.

Comment 1

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

You can set it you on File > Page Setup. There you can choose "Custom..." for the values you want. Seems to be printer specific or something, for me the value ended up in print.printer_PostScript/default.print_headerright

Comment 2

[jonesey]

Comment 1 does not work for me.  Is the commenter using the same version I am?

When I go to File -> Page Setup in the Mac OS version of Thunderbird 1.5.0.10 (20070221), I see three pop-up menus: Settings, Format for, and Paper Size.  None of these pop-up menus appear to have options for anything Custom except the paper size.  

Can the commenter provide step-by-step instructions using the Mac OS version of Thunderbird?  If they work, I will be grateful.

Also, I do not have any variables with both "print" and "PostScript" in them.  Again, I suspect a version mismatch. My variables do not look like the commenter's.

Comment 3

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

I'm on 2.0/linux, I have no idea if it looks the same on mac...
<http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/thunderbird/nightly/2.0.0.0-candidates/>

The page setup has two tabs for me: "Format and Options", "Margin & Header/footer". Those options are found under the latter.

Comment 4

[Gary Kwong [:gkw] [:nth10sd] (NOT official MoCo now)]

Attachment: screenshot

How Page Setup looks like on a Mac build of Thunderbird 2.0.0.14.

Comment 5

[ovidiu]

is comment 4 a confirmation?
(On windows, same second tab in that panel allows headers and custon txt ..)

Comment 6

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Gary, comment 5 

ludo, easy to confirm or deny?

Comment 7

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

(In reply to comment #6)
> Gary, comment 5 
> 
> ludo, easy to confirm or deny?

There's no UI. But the reporter didn't ask for a UI, he want's to customize using prefs.js.

Comment 8

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to comment #7)
> There's no UI. But the reporter didn't ask for a UI, he want's to customize
> using prefs.js.

In either case then it's ENH and not a bug.

But more to the point, it's not the job of an application to identify their user's printouts. And there are tools like https://nic-nac-project.org/~kaosmos/printingtools-en.html to help such issues.  Lastly, I suspect we wouldn't accept hidden prefs - such things are rare. Some are perhaps listed in
 http://www.bifzi.com/hiddenprefs/
 http://kb.mozillazine.org/Print.print_unwriteable_margin_%28side%29
 http://kb.mozillazine.org/About:config_Entries#Print

cc: Bryan for opinion on wontfix?

Comment 9

[Bryan Clark (DevTools PM) [:clarkbw]]

Attachment: firefox print from Mac

(In reply to comment #8)
> But more to the point, it's not the job of an application to identify their
> user's printouts. And there are tools like
> https://nic-nac-project.org/~kaosmos/printingtools-en.html to help such issues.
>  Lastly, I suspect we wouldn't accept hidden prefs - such things are rare. 

I don't think we want this in the prefs but in the print dialog.  I'm including a screenshot of the print dialog that Firefox gives (File -> Print...).  Note you can see header and footer options underneath the open combobox with "Firefox" selected.  In Thunderbird there is no such "Thunderbird" option in the combobox but instead only the standard items you can see in the list.  I imagine this is some code that Firefox has which we could steal for implementing header and footer options in Thunderbird.