725772 - FireFox no longer works with PDF995 PDF printer driver

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 717178

(Firefox :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[Paul]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:10.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/10.0
Build ID: 20120129021758

Steps to reproduce:

On 9 Feb 2012 on the battlestarcentral.com/forums/ site I used the "print view all posts in this topic" link to create a backup file of the last finished episode of the Battlestar Libra story. This creates a PHP webpage which I can view in FireFox, and also save as a complete web page. However, I prefer to save these backups as PDF files.

I use the free version of PDF995 by Software995 (www.pdf995.com) to create PDF files. This software generates a 'PDF995' virtual printer, so printing to this driver creates the desired PDF file.

FireFox has previously worked seamlessly with this software.  On 28 August 2011 I used FireFox and PDF995 to back up the first 34 episodes of Battlestar Libra. The process worked without a fault. To the best of my knowledge, my installation of FireFox was up to date then, although I do not know what the current version was.


Actual results:

While viewing the generated PHP webpage, I selected PRINT from FireFox's menu and selected the PDF995 virtual printer. A dialog box then appeared listing the name of the webpage being printed, along with a progress bar. The progress bar filled in until it reached the 30% mark, at which point it stopped and the PDF995 Save File dialog box appeared.

I attempted this several times, and each time the result was the same.

After these multiple failures, I saved the PHP webpage to my hard drive, rebooted my PC, and tried again - same result.  I also went to the PDF995 website to download and reinstall that software, to be certain I was running the latest version.  After reinstalling, I rebooted yet again and attempted to create the PDF file - same result.

At this point I switched to Internet Explorer and loaded the saved webpage.  Selecting to print to the PDF995 virtual printer worked correctly.


Expected results:

The print progress dialog bar should have filled in to 100% before the save file dialog box was triggered.

The fact that previous versions of FireFox worked properly with this setup, and Internet Explorer (blech!) works with it as well points to the newer versions of FireFox causing the issue.  I recognize, of course, that this doesn't necessarily mean FireFox truly has a bug.

I thank you for looking into this matter!

Comment 1

[Tim (fmdeveloper)]

Please provide a public URL or reduced test case that exhibits this issue.

Does the issue still occur if you start Firefox in Safe Mode? http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Safe+Mode

Comment 2

[Tim (fmdeveloper)]

Paul -> Any update? Please address comment 1....

Comment 3

[u285178]

This is probably bug 717178. If printing works with hardware acceleration disabled it is bug 717178.

Comment 4

[Tim (fmdeveloper)]

Paul -> Please disable hardware acceleration (Tools -> Options -> Advanced), restart Firefox and see if it still occurs.

Comment 5

[Paul]

Tim & Adrian:

Thank you for your responses - my apologies for my less than timely reply, but I'm new to the bug reporting process.

I have disabled hardware acceleration and restarted FireFox, and the issue with the PDF995 driver disappeared.

Paul

Comment 6

[Tim (fmdeveloper)]

Thanks for the update