453407 - with Earthlinks WebMail the body of my messages, in the default font, prints out illegibly

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 495926

(Core :: Printing: Output, defect)

Description

[Hillary]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008070208 Firefox/3.0.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008070208 Firefox/3.0.1

Something happened with Earthlinks' WebMail and/or FoxFire 3.0 and printing of emails and it happened recently- within the last week or so.
I can force the emails to show up and print in arial and it prints out fine.   Emails that I get where the body is originally sent in arial print out fine.

If I set the options in the browser NOT to use my required defaults (which I have changed to Arial as of a few hours ago), but to let the email use the font it was sent in and that font is either Courier New or Times New Roman or something similar to that- that's when I get these messed up printouts.  This also happens when I cc myself-  I can't print out my own messages.  Nor can I print them from the Sent option.
I see the messages okay on screen.  Its just when I print them out that the problem occurs-- and only when I have this Serif font as the body of my email.  The printout shows the message (minus the header which prints out fine in arial), as a conglomeration of a bunch of capital letters with slashes and quotes thrown in every now and then.

I spoke to Earthlink.  They said it was FoxFire 3.0 and that I needed new drivers for my printer.

This is happening on both my computers.  Both are connected to the single printer wirelessly.  One computer is Vista the portable is Windows 2000.

 I spoke to HP and they said it had to be the application since nothing else is effected, it can't be a driver issue.  So now I'm checking to see if its a Foxfire issue.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. look at email- looks fine
2. print email - comes out illegibly
3.  view message- shows full page with all Earthlink's wrapper, looks fine
4. check in Sent messages- looks fine, prints illegibly
5.  Happens every time I get an email that shows up in what is probably Times New Roman.
Actual Results:  
see above

Expected Results:  
would like to be able to print what I see without having to force emails into a specific font (would prefer that the font its sent in override any defaults-- the way it was set).

Started happening recently- last week or so.

Comment 1

[cmtalbert]

Thanks for the detailed report.

Hmm...it also looks like Earthlink also updated their webmail service recently too, the ad on the site says June 11, so lots of moving targets here.

* Are you running the same version of Firefox on both computers? (type about: in the URL bar to find the product version string)
* Does the corruption show up in the File->Print Preview of the email message?  
* Can you attach a test email to this bug by saving the source of the email (right click, save page as...) And then attach it here using the "upload attachment" above.
* Can you also attach a screen shot of what you're seeing? (using the add attachment link above)

Comment 2

[Hillary]

Attachment: this is what actually prints out

both same version of browser
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008070208 Firefox/3.0.1

Both email and print previews look fine-- heading arial font, message a serif font.

Comment 3

[Hillary]

Attachment: this is what the page looks like on the screen

Comment 4

[cmtalbert]

That's pretty messed up.  The email you see is being displayed as a web page.  Can you save a test email that shows the problem and upload the html file itself?  That way we can debug it. I'd have you send me an email but I don't think that would help us any because the stuff that is causing this would be lost in translation.

Take the email you want to save, right click on it and choose "Save Page As..." then just save the entire page to disk.  You can either zip those files and attach those files and attach them here, or send them to me if they are too big. (They shouldn't be too big, but you never know).  My email is ctalbert at mozilla.com.

Thanks for your help.

Comment 5

[cmtalbert]

I can't reproduce this, even using the files you sent me.  :-(

Comment 6

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

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

Comment 8

[Ant]

I wrote up Bug 554858 and have this problem too. I ran into it again (still reproducible) in my Mozilla's SeaMonkey v2.0.13 web browser. :( I will be happy to test this if it gets worked on. ;)

Comment 9

[Philip Chee]

Confirming based on Comment 8

Comment 10

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

I'm guessing this might be a form of bug 454532 (and hence might end up being a printer or print-driver-specific Cairo bug)

Ant or Hillary: Could you try printing an otherwise-known-to-be-busted email to another printer, like e.g. the trial version of CIB PDF Brewer* and report back about whether it works? (I've been able to successfully "print" PDFs with CIB PDF Brewer on Windows in the past.)

Thanks in advance!

* CIB PDF Brewer trial available here (use the first or second download link on the page, depending on whether you're 32-bit or 64-bit): http://www.cib.de/en/products/pdf-products/download.html

Comment 11

[Ant]

(In reply to comment #10)
> I'm guessing this might be a form of bug 454532 (and hence might end up being a
> printer or print-driver-specific Cairo bug)
> 
> Ant or Hillary: Could you try printing an otherwise-known-to-be-busted email to
> another printer, like e.g. the trial version of CIB PDF Brewer* and report back
> about whether it works? (I've been able to successfully "print" PDFs with CIB
> PDF Brewer on Windows in the past.)
> 
> Thanks in advance!

Daniel: I reproduced the problem easily in an updated Windows XP Pro. SP3 in VMware Workstation v7.1.3 (256 MB of RAM) with new SM v2.0.13 (defaults) and CIB PDF Brewer trial installations. See http://img716.imageshack.us/img716/9574/42724619.gif and http://img834.imageshack.us/img834/5376/28023038.gif ... So it has nothing to do with the printers and their drivers then.

Comment 12

[Hillary]

If this is the problem I emailed about a few months ago-- it works fine on another printer-- just have to remember to send it there.
I think I don't have the driver for whatever font it was that I need when I send it to the HP895cse

I now have a new problem and its with my new printer a dell 2135cn where, from 2 people so far, the letters in the email come out triple spaced (I don't think is a justified issue), and in a font which by itself is readable, but with so much space between the letters as to be almost illegible.

Comment 13

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

Thanks for the responses, Hillary & Ant -- so it sounds like at least for Hillary, it is a printer-specific issue, whereas for Ant, it's busted on all printers tried so far.

(Hillary, your new issue sounds like it's probably bug 640528.)

Comment 14

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

Ant: given that you can reproduce this, it'd be very helpful if you could try to post a testcase that reproduces the problem, so that developers (who don't have Earthlink) can investigate further.

e.g. open an email that reproduces the bug, do File | Save Page As (and make sure "web page complete" is chosen in the Save window), and then see if that saved file still reproduces the bug.

(and then, if you get to that point, you'd want to edit the saved file to remove any personal information, zip up the saved file & its folder of resources, and attach that on the bug)

Comment 15

[Ant]

Daniel: My test case can be found in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=554858 ...

I went back to my Webmail to save the two test e-mails I showed you. Where can I upload privately for SM2 developers? I don't want to attach here in public. If I delete datas from the e-mails then they might make the bug go away.

Comment 16

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

(In reply to comment #15)
> Daniel: My test case can be found in
> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=554858 ...

I don't see a testcase there. :)

> I went back to my Webmail to save the two test e-mails I showed you. Where can
> I upload privately for SM2 developers? I don't want to attach here in public.

You're welcome to email a zipped up testcase to me (dholbert at mozilla dot com).  I'm a Mozilla developer focusing on Firefox rather than Seamonkey, but I imagine the bug manifests in both...

Before emailing, could you try installing Firefox 4 and double-check whether the bug reproduces there?  (Comment 0 implies that it reproduced in Firefox 3.0, but a lot has changed since then.)

Comment 17

[Ant]

Daniel: Same results in Firefox v4.0.0 with PDF print, so now we know it is not SM and printers specific. :(


I e-mailed of my attached PrinterFriendlyWebmailsSM2013saveAs.zip file titled "Bugs: 453407 and 554858".


My test case in this section:
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Get an EarthLink account and log into https://webmail.earthlink.net.
2. Read an e-mail.
3. Use its print option (not SM's!) to print it out.
4. See print out.

Actual Results:  
E-mail's body shows unreadable texts/characters.

Expected Results:  
Readable texts/characters.

Comment 18

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

Thanks a lot, Ant! I've reduced your testcase to something very small, just text with 'font-family: Courier' applied, and it reproduces the bug for me.  (While reducing the testcase, I'd occasionally got correct output, but I could 'break' it again by restarting Firefox.)

I suspect this is duplicate of Bug 495926 (which in turn is marked as a duplicate of another bug, but I'm not sure that marking is correct)

Comment 19

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

Attachment: testcase

Comment 20

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

Attachment: screenshot of testcase when printed

This is what the testcase looks like when printed, using a mozilla-central nightly build on Windows 7 64-bit. (printed to CIB pdf brewer, in this case -- I also printed it to a HP Color LaserJet 3600, with the same results.)

Comment 21

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

I'm marking this as a duplicate of bug 453407.

Technically the dup relationship is the other direction, since this bug was filed first, but I'm doing it in this direction since bug 495926 got to the root of the issue sooner (basically in bug 495926 comment 0).