488159 - Printing page as PDF results in duplicate styled characters (bold text is doubled)

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Core :: Graphics, defect)

Description

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

STR:

1) Print http://macscripter.net/viewtopic.php?id=28947 as a PDF file from either Camino trunk or Firefox 3. (Probably happens in any Gecko 1.9.x-based browser.)
2) Open PDF in Preview.
3) Select and copy the block of AppleScript code (from just after "Open this Scriplet in your Editor:" to "end adding folder items to", inclusive).
4) Paste into a text editor.

ER: Text editor contains script exactly as displayed.

AR: Text editor contains duplicated characters for all bold words, so "on" becomes "oonn", "tell" becomes "tteellll", etc.

Not sure when this broke, but I'm pretty sure it is indeed a regression. I'll try to hunt down a window later.

Comment 1

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

Safari 3.2.1 exhibits a similar problem, wherein whole words are duplicated with some kind of whitespace character between them, so "on" becomes:

"on
on"

(I didn't investigate specifically what character is represented by \r, so it might be \n or some other CR/LF-like character), "tell" becomes:

"tell
tell"

etc.

Comment 2

[Vladimir Vukicevic [:vlad] [:vladv] (needinfo me, slow to respond)]

Pretty sure this is due to synthetic bold being used for that, which is indeed a doubling of characters (offset by a tiny bit).  Safari probably does the same thing in a different way.  Not sure what the right fix is, since we want the synthetic bold when going to a real printer.

Comment 3

[Bas Schouten (:bas.schouten)]

John, presumably nothing changed here, do we have a plan for this? Or are we going to wontfix this?

Comment 4

[John Daggett (:jtd)]

We still need a fix for this.  To start with we should figure out what WebKit is doing since they do the same double-striking we do.

Comment 5

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

Rather than double-striking, it's possible to do "synthetic bold" in PDF by changing the text-drawing mode (I forget the exact PDF commands offhand); the idea is to both fill and stroke the glyphs in order to "fatten" them a bit, depending on the stroke thickness. We'd get better results if we could detect when we're drawing to a PDF destination and change our fake-bold implementation accordingly.

Comment 6

[Michelle Funches - QA]

Pasting to TextEditor lost format (bold) but there was not duplicating
Pasting to Notes retained formatting and there was no duplicating
Version 	47.0.1
Build ID 	20160623154057
User Agent 	Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.11; rv:47.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/47.0
"ni" me if additional confirmations are needed, or if this can close

Comment 7

[yxu]

Version 	48.0.2
Build ID 20160817112116
User Agent Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.11; rv:48.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/48.0
test print:https://support.mozilla.org/zh-CN/kb/Firefox%20prints%20incorrectly#firefox:mac:fx48
or save as PDF in command+P,bold text is doubled.

Comment 8

[MarjaE]

Still unsolved in 52 esr.

Comment 9

[Andrei Purice]

Marking this as Resolved > Worksforme since the issue no longer is reproducible on the latest versions of Firefox Nightly 95.0a1 (2021-11-1), beta 94.0 or release 93.0 on MacOS 11.6.
If anyone can still reproduce the issue either re-open it or file a new one.