946542 - pdf.js renders a page correctly, but prints it incorrectly

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: PDF Viewer, defect, P3)

Description

[Chris Jones [:cjones] inactive; ni?/f?/r? if you need me]

This occurs in the Fedora 18 build of Firefox 25.

STR
 (1) Load http://www.freegigmusic.com/assets/pdf/vln-vln_amb--marche_parts.pdf .  Observe that page renders correctly.
 (2) Print the same PDF.  Observe that the printed page has garbled (missing?) glyphs.

Workaround is to open the PDF with poppler and print from there.

Comment 1

[Brendan Dahl [:bdahl]]

Appears to be fine on OSX and windows.

Comment 2

[ko_lo]

we have the same issue here under XP with FF27
text is fine with pdf.js but if we print it it's full of "rrrr" or 66666
work around : turn pdf.js off in about:config

Comment 3

[Pasquale]

I am experiencing a similar issue.  I am using pdf.js embedded into a page and the print button works perfectly fine on my development boxes (OpenSUSE 12.3 and Windows Server 2008 R2) but my client computers seem to have an issue.  On these machines, running Windows 7, the print button *appears* to work correctly in that it does seem to send the PDF data to the printer, but all pages come out blank (it does, however, spit out the correct # of blank pages).  

Right now this is all of the information that I have, but as I investigate further I will try to keep this bug ticket up-to-date.

Comment 4

[Jay Slater]

I'd like to add to this bug as it looks like it hasn't been updated in awhile.

For a summary, see my original Mozilla support post here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1087684?utm_campaign=questions-reply&utm_medium=email&utm_source=notification

It appears this is both a Mac and PC issue for PDFs printing with invalid/incorrect characters when using FF's pdf.js.

1) This example file prints differently when using pdf.js and viewed with a different orientation than the file was seemingly made for. (Compare to Adobe in Firefox, Chrome, IE, or Safari.)
https://www.superteacherworksheets.com/reading-comp/printables/1st-ball-for-my-dog_TZZMD.pdf

This first issue might be solved if pdf.js offered an Auto Portrait/Landscape option when printing. It does not though; is there or was there ever any plan for this? It seems like all of the other built in PDF readers have it.

2) This example file outputs certain characters on screen differently - and then also prints incorrect - when using pdf.js. (Compare to Adobe in Firefox, Chrome, IE, or Safari.)
https://www.superteacherworksheets.com/addition/printables/addition-i-have-who-has_WNNFQ.pdf

Since Firefox has made pdf.js the default option on newer browser versions, we've dealt with thousands of customer complaints about printing (when the screen output looks perfect). We don't want to steer users away from FF, but we have no other choice as these have been longtime nagging bugs.

Note: I also cross posted this in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=880181 - the bugs look similar and are probably related.

Comment 5

[Marco Castelluccio [:marco]]

The URLs mentioned by Jay are https://web.archive.org/web/20150319020119/http://www.superteacherworksheets.com/reading-comp/printables/1st-ball-for-my-dog_TZZMD.pdf and https://web.archive.org/web/20150501071800/https://www.superteacherworksheets.com/addition/addition-i-have-who-has_WNNFQ.pdf.

Comment 6

[Catalin Sasca, Desktop Test Engineering [:csasca]]

Tested on Firefox 114.0b9 on Ubuntu 22.04, macOS 13.3.1 and Windows 11 with the links provided by Marco in Comment 5. Printed both on PDF and physical printer (HP DeskJet 3700) and couldn't any strange behavior to the outputted files.