625852 - Text in semi-transparent elements is not selectable when printed to PDF

Status: NEW

(Core :: Printing: Output, defect)

Description

[Ilja Sekler]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:2.0b10pre) Gecko/20110114 Firefox/4.0b10pre
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:2.0b10pre) Gecko/20110114 Firefox/4.0b10pre

When printing the $URL with Firefox to PDF, text in elements with transparency (class .posted) is not selectable and doesn't appear in the output of pdftotext. With the current cairo master the transparent parts are visibly replaced with 300dpi image fallbacks (they can be dragged and dropped in evince), with in-tree cairo the results look almost perfect and the parts can't be drag'n'dropped, but the textual information is still lost.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Print $URL to a PDF file
2. Open the PDF in a PDF viewer like Evince
3. Try to select semi-transparent parts or hit Ctrl+A to select all.
Actual Results:  
Text in areas with transparency is not selected.

Expected Results:  
The entire text is selectable.

Comment 1

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Hmm.  Did this use to work in 3.6?

Comment 2

[Ilja Sekler]

(In reply to comment #1)
> Hmm.  Did this use to work in 3.6?

No. Even on Mac OS X, where Safari 5.0.3 reportedly prints <http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2010/12/new_firefox_4_betas.html> to PDF with selectable text in transparent areas, Firefox 3.6.12 fails (I got screenshots from my co-worker who has a Mac).

Comment 3

[Ilja Sekler]

(In reply to comment #0)
> With the current cairo master the transparent parts are visibly
> replaced with 300dpi image fallbacks [...]

*Argh* Please scratch that, I forgot to apply the patch for bug 624152. The results from printing to PDF with cairo git master are the same as with the in-tree cairo (semi-transparent areas look good, text is lost).

> Firefox 3.6.12 fails (I got screenshots from my co-worker
> who has a Mac).

Correction: Firefox 3.6.13.

My apologies for bugspam.