Frosted_Flake wrote:
> I have not upgraded Seamonkey yet but Firefox was just upgraded to 3.0.3
> and I now have a problem with Firefox when printing to a .pdf.
>
> I have an old faithful version of Acrobat PDF Writer that I got
> somewhere along the line with some hardware that I bought. Anyway,
> since going to 3.0.3, the PDF Writer puts out garbage.
>
> If I have a blank page (eg. about:blank) and print it from Seamonkey,
> the header says "about:blank" in readable characters.
>
> If I do the same thing from Firefox the header says "D ERXW EO D Q N
> " with the characters overlaying each other.
>
> Both Firefox and Seamonkey have the character encoding set to Unicode
> (UTF-8).
>
> I don't remember this happening with an earlier version of Firefox (but
> I don't recall when the last time I used the PDF Writer to asve a .pdf
> of a page).
>
> Does anyone have any idea what is going on?
> More importantly, does anyone know how I can get Firefox to work correctly?
>
>
It appears that it is a known bug relating to Adobe PDF Writer & certain
printer drivers:
"Bug 454532 - Font glyphs incorrectly displayed with certain printer
drivers"
This comment contains an analysis of the problem:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=454532#c3
Its a bit long, and gets rather technical, so I'll quote the relevant,
user-friendly parts:
"After reading through all these bug reports there appears to be at
least two separate bugs:
1) Firefox always prints garbage with Adobe PDF Writer. No known workaround.
....
Acrobat 5 comes with two printer drivers: PDF Writer and Distiller.
Printing from Firefox 3 to Distiller works fine. Printing to PDF Writer
produces garbage.
....
Possible solutions to this bug are:
....
2) Use Distiller instead of PDF Writer. And in more recent version of
Acrobat this is the only option."
And for a peek at the, perhaps not-so-distant future:
"3) Fix the remaining issues with the cairo PDF export and make this
available from the user interface. This is my preferred solution :-)."
And in a follow up to that, another developer responds:
"I agree with going with option 3 -- we should also detect PDF Writer
and notify the user that this isn't going to work and that they should
use Distiller or something. Doing this notification sounds painful,
though, but it's doable.
Also, we won't be able to fix that for firefox 3.0, would have to go
into 3.1.
So, it looks like FF will get native pdf printing ability.
--
Alex K.