706233 - Print to file (PDF) sometimes results in screwy text spacing

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Core :: Printing: Output, defect)

Description

[Wirawan Purwanto]

Attachment: pdfpdf.pdf (PDF printed directly from firefox "print to file")

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:8.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/8.0.1
Build ID: 20111120135848

Steps to reproduce:

Printing a web (HTML) file to PDF in firefox 6, 7 (and aurora 8 IIRC). OS: Linux Debian 6.0.3 (backport kernel 2.6.38-bpo.2-amd64), and using official 64-bit builds of firefox from mozilla.com FTP site. Not yet observed for firefox 8.0.x; will report again if this is still observed.


Actual results:

Print "to file/PDF" *sometime* resulted in texts with screwy text spacings. See file "pdfpdf.pdf" for an example. This is a front page of newegg.com at one time.

When this bug got triggered, not all texts get screwed; usually the first victim is the header/footer line (see the spacing in the example there). And sometimes a small portion of the main-body text got screwed up in their spacings.

Printing "to file/PS" does not result in this screwy spacing. See file: pdfpdf2.ps

Printing to PDF via "cups-pdf" printer driver does not result in screwy spacing either. See  file: pdfpdf3.pdf

Note that this happens only *SOMETIMES*. I can't reproducible it reliably enough so far.

My guess is that the bug lies somewhere in the firefox' internal PDF printer driver.

Comment 1

[Wirawan Purwanto]

Attachment: Postscript printout from firefox's "print to file" -> postscript option

The header line did not screw.

Comment 2

[Wirawan Purwanto]

Attachment: PDF printout produced by "cups-pdf" virtual printer driver

Comment 3

[Virgil Dicu [:virgil] [QA]]

Duplicate of bug 697153?

Can you provide a site where this reproduces more often?
Can you also test and see if this reproducible on a Nightly build?

Comment 4

[Wirawan Purwanto]

Not quite the same. I have not seen a case where the main texts are so unreadable. Usually the most screwed part is the page header.

I am not sure if I can reliably produce the bug for now.

Wirawan

Comment 5

[Wirawan Purwanto]

ok. just installed nightly build (x86_64) and tried out some print pages. Most were OK but this one:

nightly-11.0a1-print1.pdf
  Generated using x86_64 nightly build 11.0a1 (2011-12-02)
  from web page:
  http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/prerelease.html
  date: 20111202

The character spacing of the title lines were screwed now.

Comment 6

[Wirawan Purwanto]

Attachment: PDF printed directly from firefox "print to file", using nightly build 11.0a1 (2011-12-02) x86_64 linux

Comment 7

[Virgil Dicu [:virgil] [QA]]

Thanks for trying this. 

The pdf was displayed fine for me when using Nightly.
Moving this to Print-Output.

Comment 8

[Wirawan Purwanto]

Can you give me the detail of your OS? Like, which distro, which kernel version, and arch you are running on. I want to see if this is due to my debian OS or actually due to firefox itself.

This is bizzare! Just now, I tried to print the same page again as PDF (exactly the same URL, print destination, etc), it showed up fine!

Wirawan

Comment 9

[Virgil Dicu [:virgil] [QA]]

Ubuntu 11.10, 3.0.0-12-generic, x86_64

Forgot to mention this. Did you try to reproduce with a clean profile?
http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Basic+Troubleshooting#Make_a_new_profile

But as you say this occur intermittently, then that already might have answered my question. 
Please update here if you find more information about this.

Comment 10

[Wirawan Purwanto]

I tried this two days ago. SO far so good. I will report in case it still occurs again.

Comment 11

[Virgil Dicu [:virgil] [QA]]

Any updates here, Wirawan? Does this work for you now?

Comment 12

[rf.0x3e41]

I'm having the same problem, with Firefox 10.0.2. However, I see the problem consistently.

1 - On page: https://forum.librivox.org/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=35671&start=0 , I print to (PDF) file. I can use any file name. The file prints to the file fine and looks correct in a PDF viewer (Acrobat or Okular).  However, this must be the first time I print to file in the session.

2 - Click on the "Next" link (upper left corner of the page. After the page loads, print to (PDF) file again. Again, any new name is fine.  The file appears to print fine. However, the page is munged up, in the PDF viewer.

3 - Next click on the "Previous" link (upper left corner). This returns to the first page, which printed and appears fine at 1 above. Again, print to file to any new name. This should be a a copy of the page printed at 1 above. Unfortunately, the file/print is munged up.

4 - This appears to be web site dependent also, The above link is to the LibriVox forums and is reliable for showing the problem, to me anyhow. I've only seen the problem on one other web site. Which may explain the intermittent nature of the problem. Also, other users of the LibriVox forums I've contacted use Firefox and Slackware and don't see the problem.

5 - This is PDF specific. If I select postscript, the print to file works fine in all cases. In the older versions of Firefox, which default to PS, this problem doesn't occur. I thinks I've seen this with FF 9.x but didn't record the problem and version at the time.

6 - I'm using Slackware 13.37 (with all patches) on an Intel 32 dual core processor. Firefox is the 10.0.2 version, FTP'ed from either the University of Utah or Georgia Tech (I don't remember which). The default version of Firefox (8.0) with Slackware works fine (but of course it defaults to PS, which works anyhow).

Comment 13

[rf.0x3e41]

Follow on to Comment 12.

With Firefox 11.0, the problem is worse than in FF 10.0.2. In FF 11.0 all the text has screwy spacing, not primarily the titles/headers.

Comment 14

[Wirawan Purwanto]

(In reply to Virgil Dicu [:virgil] [QA] from comment #11)
> Any updates here, Wirawan? Does this work for you now?

Yes, it works fine! I have remake a clean profile with firefox (8 or 9, don't remember now) and since then never had problem with funny printout anymore. I am using firefox 10.0.2 as of this writing.

Comment 15

[Wirawan Purwanto]

(In reply to rf.0x3e41 from comment #12)
> I'm having the same problem, with Firefox 10.0.2. However, I see the problem
> consistently.
...

I tried your steps 1...3 (with librivox webpages you mentioned) with my firefox 10.0.2 (x86-64 build officially from http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/  , I did not see any of these problems. Could you upload screwy PDF here?

Just to be sure: please confirm if I am correct:

1) the first page to be printed is titled  "Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen (1775-1817)"

2) the second page title is "The Old Debauchees by Henry Fielding (1707 - 1754)"

3) the third page title is "Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen (1775-1817)" (again)

Did you try to make a new profile and print again from that profile, and see if it resolves the problem?

Wirawan

Comment 16

[rf.0x3e41]

Attachment: Files from print to file, in tgz format

This is a tgz file containing the examples asked for in Comment 14, and described in Comment 15.

Comment 17

[rf.0x3e41]

Wirawan,

This is my first bug report, sorry about getting the comment # wrong.

First, yes I tried creating a new profile (in FF 10.0.2). The result with the new profile was the same as with the old profile. Also, I tried completely deleting the $HOME/.mozilla directory then restarting Firefox (10.0.2). Again the result was the same, with the first PDF OK and the rest munged up.

#####

Next, in Comment 15 your step 2 went to the wrong page.

The URL sequence is:

1) https://forum.librivox.org/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=35671&start=0
2) https://forum.librivox.org/viewtopic.php?f=27&t=35671&sid=52c9d075341b35123b463316dcff6165&start=15
3) https://forum.librivox.org/viewtopic.php?f=27&t=35671&start=0

I load the pages by using the links in the upper left of the first page:

First page snip>>>>

	 Page 1 of 19  [ 273 posts ] 
Go to page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 ... 19  Next

<<<<end snip on 2012/03/15

Second page snip>>>>

	 Page 2 of 19  [ 273 posts ] 
Go to page Previous  1, 2, 3, 4, 5 ... 19  Next

<<<<end snip on 2012/03/15

I used the "Next" (first page) and "Previous" (second page) links to load the pages.

I've noticed that on rare occasions, going to a completely different page "resets" something such that the print to file temporarily works.

#####

I've uploaded examples in the file "Comment_15_attachments.tgz", the file test113.pdf is the first print to file (step 1 in Comment 12). It is OK. The file test114a.pdf is the print to file of the second page (step 2 in Comment 12), which is bad. The file test114b.pdf is the print to file of the first page (step 3 in Comment 12), which is also bad. This file (test114b.pdf) should be the same as the first file (test113.pdf). These examples were made with Firefox 11.0.

#####

By the way is there a way to edit comments, such that I could correct the Comment numbers in Comment 16?

Thanks,

rf.0x3e41

Comment 18

[rf.0x3e41]

The instance of this problem (as I've seen), seems to be solved with Firefox 12.0. Using FF 12, at the sites where the problem regularly occurred, the problem no longer occurs and the resulting PDF's look fine.

There is one curious note, and may not be related to this problem. After saving to PDF with FF 12, on opening the resulting PDF in Adobe Acrobat (V 8.1.2) I get a popup window with the following message:

The font 'EKEMSN+NimbusSansL' contains a bad /BBox.

I don't know if it is related to this issue, or a different problem. Clicking "OK" makes the message go away and the PDF still fine. I don't see the message in other readers (Okular).

Thanks

rf.03e41

Comment 19

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Reporter no longer sees this problem