885992 - Issue with printing pages containing Web Fonts in Firefox 21.0

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Core :: Printing: Output, defect)

Description

[Paramanand Singh]

Attachment: 1.pdf

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:21.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/21.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20130511120803

Steps to reproduce:

Visit any website containing CSS web-fonts (for example http://www.mathjax.org/demos/tex-samples/ which contains web-fonts for displaying math content) and then check print preview. The web fonts look very good in web-page and print preview. Now print using a PDF printer (say PDFCreator) and open the resulting PDF file. In the PDF the web-fonts are not stored as fonts but rather each character is drawn as a sort of vector graphics. In the PDF file it is not possible to select the web-fonts as text and the resulting size of the PDF is large as each character is treated as a separate vector image.

This issue is seen in Firefox 21.0 on Windows 7, but not on Firefox 19.0. I am not sure if this is an issue or a result of design change for handling CSS web-fonts during printing.

I have attached the PDF file corresponding to http://www.mathjax.org/demos/tex-samples/

Comment 1

[Swarnava Sengupta (:Swarnava)]

can you try this issue on safe mode? 

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/troubleshoot-firefox-issues-using-safe-mode

how about latest nightly?

nightly.mozilla.org

Comment 2

[Paramanand Singh]

Hello Swarnava,
To my surprise the issue is gone if I run firefox in safe mode. I am wondering which add-on/extension is creating problem here. Can you help me figure out which extension could be causing this problem (just in case if you know some extension to be buggy in this regard otherwise I will find out by disabling all and enabling extensions one by one)? I have attached the snapshots of about:addons (both plugins and extensions).

Thanks for the suggestion to use safe mode.

Comment 3

[Paramanand Singh]

After further checking by manually disabling all the plugins and extensions I found that the issue is there. It means that the issue is not caused by some plugins or extensions, but that there are some custom settings which are reset in safe mode and then the problem is gone.

For the time being I will use PDF printing only in safe mode as a sort of temporary solution.

Comment 4

[Swarnava Sengupta (:Swarnava)]

how about resetting Firefox?

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-firefox-easily-fix-most-problems

Comment 5

[Paramanand Singh]

resetting Firefox did not work (strange!). But when I use safe mode things work fine.

Comment 6

[[:Aleksej]]

Maybe it depends on whether hardware acceleration is enabled?  Options → Advanced → General.

Comment 7

[Paramanand Singh]

Hello Aleksej,
I am very glad to tell you that disabling H/w acceleration has fixed my problem. Additionally I had to set the configuration "printer_PDFCreator.print_downloadfonts" in about:config as "true". Clearly this makes sense because if I need to embed web-fonts in PDF I must enable PDFCreator to download the required font. Also disabling h/w acc seems necessary as just enabling the print_downloadfonts property does not help.

However I did not understand how h/w acceleration affect font embedding printing. Anyway I am glad that this issue got fixed. Thanks to all of you involved behind mozilla.

Regards,
Paramanand

Comment 8

[[:Aleksej]]

It seems that you are not "printing" using Firefox's internal PDF printer ("print into file").

Are you viewing the file with a non-Firefox viewer?

Comment 9

[Paramanand Singh]

Hello,
I am printing using Print->Print Preview and then I click Print button when I see that the print preview is OK. After this I can see the Print dialog which shows list of installed printers and various settings. Out of the installed printers I choose PDFCreator which is a kind of s/w printer which generates a PDF file corresponding to the web-page.

This generated PDF I view in both Adobe PDF Reader and Foxit PDF reader.

Comment 10

[markaconnelly]

Hello,

I've also had this issue using User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:64.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/64.0.

I have tried the following to no avail:

1. Creating a new profile.
2. Opening Firefox in safe mode.
3. Disabling hardware acceleration.
4. Printing using Firefox 60 in Ubuntu. (This one worked -- the others didn't.)

Additional details are at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1522753, which was marked as a duplicate of https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1343882 (however, I have observed this with WOFF and TrueType fonts also, not just WOFF2).

Thanks.