Need help with major printing malfunction

[Ronald F. Guilmette-2]

Greetings,

I recently freshened up my installed version of Firefox from whatever
crusty old version I was running to firefox-3.5.1,1.  (I'm running
FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE by the way.)

Anyway, ever since that ``upgrade'' a few old problems that had annoyed
me for a long time went away, but a couple of new ones emerged.

The one that's most annoying is that now, whenever I print anything
from within Firefox, the text portion of whever comes out on my printer
is utterly unreadable/illegable.  I'm just guessing, but it looks to
me like whatever font is being used is just wrong and/or (perhaps)
Firefox is trying to emulate BOLDFACE font with overstrikes or something.

Anyway, this is really a very major major problem for me, and I'm sorta
hoping that somebody here will take pity on me and give me some clues
about how I might be able to debug this problem.  I don't even know where
to begin looking for the problem, so any pointers would be greatly
appreciated.

(Note:  My printer is an old HP Laserjet 5MP.  It speaks Postscript
and... I think... HP PCL 5... or maybe 6.  Note also that I was never
very fond of all of the complexity of the FreeBSD lpr subsystem...
it always seemed like total overkill for a one-user system... so
I hacked up my own little Perl script that I call "printit" that just
sends whatever it is given to /dev/lp0.  I used that for printing,
rather than the lpr command.  In the past, Mozilla/Firefox has always
handed by little script pure Postscript... which worked out nicely
since my printer groks that... and so I'm kind of assuming that Firefox
is still converting pages to Postscript whenever I ask it to print
something, but frankly, I'm not even sure of this anymore.)

Again, any help or pointers would be appreciated.  Please reply on-list,
because otherwise, my tragically hostile and inept spam-filtering here
may prevent me from ever seeing your response.

Thanks in advance.


Regards,
rfg


P.S.  Before the ``upgrade'' to 3.5.1, things used to print just fine...
well...  the text portions did anyway.
_______________________________________________
freebsd-mozilla@... mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-mozilla
To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-mozilla-unsubscribe@..."

[Guido Falsi]

On Wed, Sep 02, 2009 at 12:56:15AM -0700, Ronald F. Guilmette wrote:

> (Note:  My printer is an old HP Laserjet 5MP.  It speaks Postscript
> and... I think... HP PCL 5... or maybe 6.  Note also that I was never
> very fond of all of the complexity of the FreeBSD lpr subsystem...
> it always seemed like total overkill for a one-user system... so
> I hacked up my own little Perl script that I call "printit" that just
> sends whatever it is given to /dev/lp0.  I used that for printing,
> rather than the lpr command.  In the past, Mozilla/Firefox has always
> handed by little script pure Postscript... which worked out nicely
> since my printer groks that... and so I'm kind of assuming that Firefox
> is still converting pages to Postscript whenever I ask it to print
> something, but frankly, I'm not even sure of this anymore.)

I was having similar problems with an HP printer. A network one in my
case. I'm using lpr with a filter. It used to send postscript verbatim
to the printer and filter text through a2ps.

I was having problems with bad fonts and paper sizes(I'm in europe and
we use A4 here, but the printer insisted in using US letter).

All the problems vanished when I finally modified the filter to also
filter all ps through ghostscript and send pcl jobs to the printer.

My guess is that the printer's postscript interpreter is broken(or has
some "features"). Try modifying your script to filter things through
ghostscript and send trhen to the printer in it's own language.

I use the following ghostscript command line(from stdin to stdout...):

/usr/local/bin/gs -dSAFER -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -q -sPAPERSIZE=a4
-sDEVICE=pxlcolor -sOutputFile=- -

> P.S.  Before the ``upgrade'' to 3.5.1, things used to print just fine...
> well...  the text portions did anyway.

I think firefox started using much fancier postscript after 3.0.x

--
Guido Falsi <mad@...>
_______________________________________________
freebsd-mozilla@... mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-mozilla
To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-mozilla-unsubscribe@..."

[Ronald F. Guilmette-2]

In message <20090902084031.GB26668@...>, you wrote:

>On Wed, Sep 02, 2009 at 12:56:15AM -0700, Ronald F. Guilmette wrote:
>> (Note:  My printer is an old HP Laserjet 5MP.  It speaks Postscript
>> and... I think... HP PCL 5... or maybe 6.  Note also that I was never
>> very fond of all of the complexity of the FreeBSD lpr subsystem...
>> it always seemed like total overkill for a one-user system... so
>> I hacked up my own little Perl script that I call "printit" that just
>> sends whatever it is given to /dev/lp0.  I used that for printing,
>> rather than the lpr command.  In the past, Mozilla/Firefox has always
>> handed by little script pure Postscript... which worked out nicely
>> since my printer groks that... and so I'm kind of assuming that Firefox
>> is still converting pages to Postscript whenever I ask it to print
>> something, but frankly, I'm not even sure of this anymore.)
>
>I was having similar problems with an HP printer. A network one in my
>case. I'm using lpr with a filter. It used to send postscript verbatim
>to the printer and filter text through a2ps.
>
>I was having problems with bad fonts and paper sizes(I'm in europe and
>we use A4 here, but the printer insisted in using US letter).
>
>All the problems vanished when I finally modified the filter to also
>filter all ps through ghostscript and send pcl jobs to the printer.
>
>My guess is that the printer's postscript interpreter is broken(or has
>some "features"). Try modifying your script to filter things through
>ghostscript and send trhen to the printer in it's own language.
>
>I use the following ghostscript command line(from stdin to stdout...):
>
>/usr/local/bin/gs -dSAFER -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -q -sPAPERSIZE=a4
>-sDEVICE=pxlcolor -sOutputFile=- -
>
>> P.S.  Before the ``upgrade'' to 3.5.1, things used to print just fine...
>> well...  the text portions did anyway.
>
>I think firefox started using much fancier postscript after 3.0.x

This does not appear to explain the problem(s) I'm having.  Rather, it
appears that the Postscript (level 3) being generated by the Firefox on
my system is just really really messed up.

I say this because I have been experimenting around, and I just ``printed''
a particular web page (https://www.monoprice.com/home/myaccount.asp) to a
disk file and then I tried to view that using ghostview/ghostscript and
the text of the ``printed'' page is *still* entirely hosed.

See for yourself!  Here is the web URL again:

   https://www.monoprice.com/home/myaccount.asp

and here is the Firefox-printed version of that same page:

   http://www.tristatelogic.com/misc/monoprice.ps

Please _do_ try looking at that with any kind of postscript-aware thing
you have available to you (e.g. ghostview) and you'll see that the text
is *seriously* messed up to the point where it is entirely unreadable.

NOTE:  My installed versions of ghostview/ghostscript are:

        ghostscript-gpl-8.62_3
        ghostview-1.5_2

I am assuming that these tools *do* know how to properly process Postscript
level 3 documents... such as the kind that are allegedly coming out of
Firefox when one tries to printe a web page... so if I look at the ``printed''
file with these tools, and if the pages are still all messed up (as they are)
then it must be because Forefox itself is just plain outputting garbage, right?

So I'm back to square one, and I still need to know:  How do I debug this
problem?


Regards,
rfg


P.S.  To be honest, it is stunning to me that whoever did the port of Firefox
3.5.1 to FreeBSD allowed that port to make it into the ports tree when, it
seems, the bleepin' thing can't even print a simple web page.

(And by the way, who is "gecko@..." anyway?  Is that a real person,
or just a role?)
_______________________________________________
freebsd-mozilla@... mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-mozilla
To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-mozilla-unsubscribe@..."

[Guido Falsi]

On Wed, Sep 02, 2009 at 04:12:14PM -0700, Ronald F. Guilmette wrote:

> This does not appear to explain the problem(s) I'm having.  Rather, it
> appears that the Postscript (level 3) being generated by the Firefox on
> my system is just really really messed up.
>
> I say this because I have been experimenting around, and I just ``printed''
> a particular web page (https://www.monoprice.com/home/myaccount.asp) to a
> disk file and then I tried to view that using ghostview/ghostscript and
> the text of the ``printed'' page is *still* entirely hosed.
>
> See for yourself!  Here is the web URL again:
>
>    https://www.monoprice.com/home/myaccount.asp
>
> and here is the Firefox-printed version of that same page:
>
>    http://www.tristatelogic.com/misc/monoprice.ps
>
> Please _do_ try looking at that with any kind of postscript-aware thing
> you have available to you (e.g. ghostview) and you'll see that the text
> is *seriously* messed up to the point where it is entirely unreadable.
>
> NOTE:  My installed versions of ghostview/ghostscript are:
>
> ghostscript-gpl-8.62_3
> ghostview-1.5_2
>
> I am assuming that these tools *do* know how to properly process Postscript
> level 3 documents... such as the kind that are allegedly coming out of
> Firefox when one tries to printe a web page... so if I look at the ``printed''
> file with these tools, and if the pages are still all messed up (as they are)
> then it must be because Forefox itself is just plain outputting garbage, right?
>
> So I'm back to square one, and I still need to know:  How do I debug this
> problem?

I see. I was loking better at my prints and I also notice some problems
with certain fonts. It loks like a font problem to me. Like some font
commonly used in web pages is rendered in print by some bitmap or
missing font by firefox.

In your case the problem is exacerbated...For some reason I really don't
understand.

> P.S.  To be honest, it is stunning to me that whoever did the port of Firefox
> 3.5.1 to FreeBSD allowed that port to make it into the ports tree when, it
> seems, the bleepin' thing can't even print a simple web page.
>
> (And by the way, who is "gecko@..." anyway?  Is that a real person,
> or just a role?)

It's a mailing list. So a group of people(of which I'm not part, I'm
just subscribed to the list).

--
Guido Falsi <mad@...>
_______________________________________________
freebsd-mozilla@... mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-mozilla
To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-mozilla-unsubscribe@..."