635768 - pages print improperly

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Core :: Printing: Output, defect, major)

Description

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

http://www.rosettatechnologies.com/products-micr-printers-SP8200DNMICR-accessories.asp  prints OK in chrome. But in Firefox (4.0) they are badly messed up, even though print preview looks fine.

Comment 1

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert] (blocking needinfo/review, due to AFK on parental leave 12/9 - 1/6)]

Can you print to PDF or PS and attach the resulting file?

WORKSFORME on Linux, FWIW.  (The printout looks just like Print Preview & isn't obviously busted.)
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:2.0b12pre) Gecko/20110220 Firefox/4.0b12pre

Comment 2

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Attachment: print to "PDF995 printer"

"prints" equally badly for me using PDF995 driver / postcript. See attached

(I'll have to set up a real postcript driver to a real printer to test postscript.)

Comment 3

[Srinivas]

Good nightly - 2011-02-19         
Bad nightly - 2011-02-20     

Pushlog - http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/pushloghtml?fromchange=657c2a92ee2b&tochange=e77f4eda0bad

Comment 5

[Jonathan Kew (:jfkthame)]

Looks like this could be a regression from bug 634762. I'll try to reproduce and investigate.

Comment 6

[Jonathan Kew (:jfkthame)]

Confirming that I see similar problems here (on Win7). This only occurs when using GDI fonts; with D2D enabled, or with GDI rendering but DirectWrite explicitly chosen via prefs, the printed rendering is as expected.

Comment 7

[Jonathan Kew (:jfkthame)]

Attachment: patch, restore explicit font selection in gfxGDIFont::GetGlyphWidth

On further testing, the spacing problems _only_ occur when using GDI fonts _and_ using the harfbuzz shaping path, indicating that the problem is specific to the code that gets glyph metrics for harfbuzz via GDI.

I thought with the revised DCFromContext code in bug 634762, we could eliminate the use of AutoSelectFont to select the HFONT in gfxGDIFont::GetGlyphWidth, but that does not work reliably when printing; I think this may be related to using a different (non-identity) CTM in the cairo context.

One solution would be to retrieve the CTM from cairo and apply it to the metrics we're currently getting, but that would introduce extra conversion to/from floating-point within this function, which does not seem desirable. At this point,  think the simplest and lowest-risk fix is to restore AutoSelectFont in GetGlyphWidth, to ensure we're getting metrics from the appropriately scaled Windows font.

Comment 8

[Jonathan Kew (:jfkthame)]

http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/88752f2b3088

Comment 13

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

v.fixed Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0; rv:2.0b13pre) Gecko/20110228 Firefox/4.0b13pre

thanks!

Comment 15

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

what's with the date of "20100101" in the buildid of these dupes from 4.0b12?

Comment 16

[Jonathan Kew (:jfkthame)]

See http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/09/final-user-agent-string-for-firefox-4/, in particular point 6: "The Gecko build date in the “Gecko/yyyymmdd” token has been frozen to 20100101 for Firefox releases."

Comment 29

[Jack Yan]

I’ve a feeling my latest bug is related.

When printing to my Epson Stylus Photo 830U, I notice that the ligatures (e.g. fi) are missing and replaced with a dot.

When printing the same page (http://lucire.com) to PDF, the spacing goes haywire. The fonts that Firefox is accessing are PostScript Type 1s.

When printing a page using OpenType fonts (e.g. http://autocade.net), I continue to have missing glyphs—again the ligatures and, in this case, a special Th ligature that is in the OpenType tables to replace the T–h combination.

Comment 30

[Jack Yan]

The build is one of the nightlies from, say, two nights ago. Attaching PDFs in next messages.

Comment 31

[Jack Yan]

Attachment: Printing lucire.com to PDF—spacing is haywire

Note: fonts on the page are PostScript, though header and footer font is OpenType.

Comment 32

[Jack Yan]

Attachment: Autocade home page: ligatures dropped

Fonts appearing here are OpenType and TrueType. Note: the output font in the PDF does not match the page one, which is TrueType.

Comment 34

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to comment #31)
> Created attachment 517661 [details]
> Printing lucire.com to PDF—spacing is haywire

this example matches this bug. but you have probably noted the nightly builds were patched as of 2011-02-24. so if your build is from 2 nights ago then some aspec of this problem remains. can't speak for the other example. please reconfirm and post date of your build

Comment 35

[Jack Yan]

Hi Wayne: I’m on what Minefield claims is current—even though I downloaded on the 6th, the version is 4.0b13pre (2011-03-05).

Comment 36

[Timothy Nikkel (:tnikkel)]

Please file new bugs for any issues that are still present.

Comment 39

[Jonathan Kew (:jfkthame)]

(In reply to comment #34)
> (In reply to comment #31)
> > Created attachment 517661 [details]
> > Printing lucire.com to PDF—spacing is haywire
> 
> this example matches this bug. but you have probably noted the nightly builds
> were patched as of 2011-02-24. so if your build is from 2 nights ago then some
> aspec of this problem remains. can't speak for the other example. please
> reconfirm and post date of your build

I can confirm this happens with a PS Type 1 font in a current build. Although the symptoms look the same as this bug, the underlying cause must be different as it does not depend on the choice of harfbuzz vs platform shaping, and applies only to Type 1 fonts and not TT/OT fonts.

I've filed bug 640528 about this issue.

Comment 42

[Channy Yun [:channy]]

Attachment: PrintError in Windows XP SP3

I got some reports from users there were still problems only in Windows XP. Please check out other languages in Windows XP.

Comment 43

[June Kim]

Attachment: Spacing error remains in FF4.0 on WinXP

This error remains in FF4.0 on WinXP. For example, see http://agile.egloos.com/5493814 and its PDF output to compare. Notice that excessive spaing between characters in the comment/traceback area on the left and the right column.

Comment 45

[Roland Bouman]

Attachment: print of lucire.com to pdf indicating stretched out text.

Comment 46

[Roland Bouman]

See attachment 593051 [details]. I am still experiencing this issue. 
I'm on ubuntu 11.10, using firefox Aurora 11.0a2 (2012-01-26)

Comment 47

[Timothy Nikkel (:tnikkel)]

Please file a new bug for that.