Alex K. wrote:
> 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.
>
OK, I understand the problem butnot how to fix it. I do NOT have
Distiller and can't seem to locate where to get it (I do see something
about the availability of an update but I don't have the basic Distiller).

I'm unable (unwilling) to purchase a full blown Acrobat just to produce
a .pdf from a web page. All of the other options that I have seen,
using verious flavors of 'ghostscript' and such, seem way more
complicated than necessary.

Since creating a .pdf with the print process of Seamonkey still works
(until Seamonkey is 'fixed'), I'll just have to stick with that unless
someone out there knows where I can get a 'printer' for pdf's that works
with Firefox. Any hints???
--
The Frosted Flake
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