480849 - Monospace text is printed with low quality to Postscript file

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Manuel Lemos]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.6) Gecko/2009012700 SUSE/3.0.6-0.1 Firefox/3.0.6
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.6) Gecko/2009012700 SUSE/3.0.6-0.1 Firefox/3.0.6

When printing a page with mostly monospace text (<pre>), Firefox 3 generates a very low quality Postscript file as you may see in kghostview. The same happens when saving to PDF.

When importing it to scribus, it does not show anything.

When using Firefox 2 the quality is very good and the text could be edited in scribus.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open a page just with text within a <pre> section.
2. Print the page to a Postscript file
3. View the generated Postscript in kghostview and try import it to scribus
Actual Results:  
Low quality graphics is rendered as text.

Nothing appears when importing to scribus 

Expected Results:  
The same as in Firefox 2: good quality graphics to rendered as text and the text appears when importing to scribus.

Sample files will be attached.

Comment 1

[Manuel Lemos]

Attachment: Sample page with monospace text

Comment 2

[Manuel Lemos]

Attachment: Print to file in Postscript format

Comment 3

[Manuel Lemos]

Attachment: Print to file in Postscript format under Firefox 2

Comment 4

[Manuel Lemos]

Attachment: Print to file in PDF format

Comment 5

[u285178]

The font selected is a bitmap font so printing it is always going to look ugly. What is your default monospace font set to in preferences? Try changing it to a TrueType font like DejaVu Sans Mono or Bitstream Vera Sans Mono.

Comment 6

[Manuel Lemos]

I was using Adobe Courier which looks fine on my screen. I changed to a TrueType font as you suggested and now it looks fine.

Anyway, in Firefox 2 I did not have this problem, as you may see by the sample Postscript file attached to this report.

Something changed in Firefox 3, so the quality now depends on whether you choose TrueType fonts.

Comment 7

[John Littleton]

Printing with CutePDF as the print driver exhibits similar behavior (Windows XP SP3). 

Apparently, FF 2.0.0.20 and FF 3.5 do not render fonts the same way. Under FF 2.0.0.20, printing an html document containing Courier, Helvetica and Helvetica-Bold fonts generates a PDF where CutePDF substitutes CourierStd, ArialMT and Arial-BoldMT. When printing the very same html document from Firefox 3.5, CutePDF substitutes two True Type custom fonts (TTE109B009t00, TTE1997920t00). In testing with other documents, 

I also found FF 3.5 printing to CutePDF now converts the Courier font to a graphic image of the original text. Firefox 2.0.0.20 does not exhibit this behavior. The result is that CutePDF generates a significantly larger PDF when used with Firefox 3.5.

Comment 8

[Tyler Downer [He/Him]]

Reporter, please retest with Firefox 3.6.12 or later in a fresh profile (http://support.mozilla.com/kb/Managing+profiles). Also update your plugins (flash, adobe reader, java, quicktime, silverlight, etc.) Go to the developer's website and download the latest version from there. If you no longer see this issue, please close this bug as RESOLVED, WORKSFORME. If you do see the bug, please post a comment.

Comment 9

[Manuel Lemos]

I still see this issue if the monospace font option is set to a bitmap font like Adobe Courier as mentioned above. Changing to a TrueType font improves the quality monospaced text is still converted to bitmaps.

IMHO, I think the generated Postscript should use a PostScript font built-in the printers like Adobe Courier, instead of converting font letters to bitmaps.

Comment 10

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Reporter, can you still reproduce using a current version?
If no, please set status to RESOLVED and resolution to WORKSFORME.
If yes, please provide updated information.

Comment 11

[Phoenix]

Resolved per whiteboard