422922 - Bold text is printed as gibberish, with certain printer drivers.

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Core :: Printing: Output, defect)

Description

[Asger Krüger]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9b4) Gecko/2008030714 Firefox/3.0b4
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9b4) Gecko/2008030714 Firefox/3.0b4

Printing the mentioned page results in all bold text looking as gibberish, while the rest looks just fine. 
No problems with viewing the page in the browser. 


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Load the page.
2. Print it through File->Print
3.
Actual Results:  
Bold text is printed as gibberish.

Expected Results:  
Printed the text as it appeared on screen.

No problems when using IE 7 to print.
Printer Kyocera KM-2050

The same thing happens with many other pages too but not all though.

Comment 1

[E.Clay Buchanan]

I am seeing this bug also.  We have a Kyocera Copystar 2050 copier and network printer and I see the same thing when printing the Yahoo home page for example from Firefox V3.0.   Bold items are gibberish, other text looks fine.  IE 7 prints correctly.
ecbyahoo

Comment 3

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

Asger / E.Clay / anyone else: Do you still see this bug?

Comment 4

[E.Clay Buchanan]

(In reply to comment #3)
> Asger / E.Clay / anyone else: Do you still see this bug?

Absolutely, It is still present on this version of Mozilla.  I constantly have to switch to Internet Explorer 8 to get a good print of an HTML screen.

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.5) Gecko/20091102 Firefox/3.5.5 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)

Comment 5

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

Attachment: simple testcase

Does this testcase reproduce the problem for you?

Comment 6

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

(updating branch field to "Trunk", since apparently this has persisted at least as far as 3.5.5 per comment 4, and as far as we know so far, it could affect trunk builds as well)

Comment 7

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

Also: do you get the same broken output when printing to a PDF file?  ("CIB PDF Brewer" is a free PDF printer that's worked well for me in the past.)

Comment 8

[E.Clay Buchanan]

> Does this testcase reproduce the problem for you?

Yes it does recreate the problem!  The normal text is completely readable while the bold text is garbled.

Comment 9

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

Comment on attachment 416142 [details]
simple testcase

Good to know, thanks!  

If you could print the attached testcase to a PDF (with CIB PDF Brewer or a similar product), and report back on whether that's broken for you as well, that would be helpful.  (and please attach the resulting PDF file, if it does end up being broken)

Comment 10

[E.Clay Buchanan]

> If you could print the attached testcase to a PDF (with CIB PDF Brewer

I installed the CIB PDF Brewer and the PDF produced by that program does indeed print the test case correctly.  Bold text comes out bolded.  Interesting.

Comment 11

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

So this is probably related to your specific printer / printer-driver then -- an instance of bug 454532.

Are you using the latest driver? (if not, could you test the latest version?)

Comment 12

[E.Clay Buchanan]

(In reply to comment #11)
> So this is probably related to your specific printer / printer-driver then --

That is true but...don't forget that Internet Explorer prints the test case document fine.  Clearly there is some difference in the print stream.  Firefox is sending something to that printer driver that neither IE or the CIB PDF Brewer is sending.

Comment 13

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

(In reply to comment #12)
> (In reply to comment #11)
> > So this is probably related to your specific printer / printer-driver then 
> That is true but...don't forget that Internet Explorer prints the test case
> document fine.  Clearly there is some difference in the print stream.

Right -- but that doesn't necessarily mean Firefox (or in this case cairo, the low-level rendering engine used in Firefox 3.0+) is broken -- it could just be sending a particular command to the printer and hitting a bug in the printer/driver, or it could be trying to do something that the printer driver doesn't support.

In any case, whether it's a Firefox bug or not, ideally we'd want to be able to work around issues like these with specific printer-drivers.  Bug 454532 goes into technical detail about various types of issues that could be involved here.

Again, if you can update your printer driver and report back on whether that fixes the issue, that would be helpful. (In many cases, that fixes issues like this.)

Comment 14

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

reporter, does this still fail when using Firefox 5 *beta* http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/channel/ or Firefox 4?

Comment 15

[Mats Palmgren (inactive)]

Asger / E.Clay / anyone else: Do you still see this bug in Firefox 7 or newer?