From: Michael Leuchtenburg Date: 08:18 on 14 Mar 2007 Subject: Firefox 2.0's printing So here I am, trying to print out a couple of chapters from a book on a website. The website uses a default font of around, oh, 10pt. Firefox is happy to override this for display on the screen, which requires all fonts to be at least 12pt, but when it comes to printing, it's rather unwilling to listen to me. I change my default font size to 18pt and, lo and behold - nothing changes. Not in the print preview, anyway, and I'd rather not waste paper exploring Firefox's brokenness. So, I size up the font a bit more with Ctrl++. And, lo and behold - nothing changes. Next, I go into the print setup, and uncheck "Shrink To Fit Page Width". This time, I'm ready, and as expected - nothing changes. Back into print setup. I increase the scale to 125%. And hey! Suddenly the print preview is showing roughly 125% the size of my default font. Of course, that's now 18pt, so 125% the size is a bit too big, even for printed reference material. I try lowering it a bit, to 101%. Back to the previous tiny 10pt font. 110%? No good. 120%? Nothing. 125%? Back to huge-land. 121%? Nothing. 122? 123? Aha! 123%! The magic number! The number which makes everything change! I've tipped over into the other path in some mysterious decision tree deep within Firefox's no-doubt unruly bowels and, lo-and-behold, the text is enormous. There was a time, back with Firefox 1.0, when the print previewer would allow you to set the scale and print with the desired scale, upon finding the right size. Now, of course, not only do I get to play the "which percentages actually make things happen" game, but I have to dodge in and out of preview and setup in order to try things out. Oh, and to make things better, the print preview isn't an accurate picture of the way things actually print. That would be way too fucking easy, wouldn't it? And we can't have users actually getting what they want. That wouldn't be nearly hateful enough.
From: Robert Rothenberg Date: 16:07 on 16 Mar 2007 Subject: Re: Firefox 2.0's printing Lots of things are hateful about Firefox printing. Go to View -> Page Style and select No Style. Then Print Preview. Ignored. Worse, it's re-enabled the stylesheet.
From: Aaron J. Grier Date: 22:51 on 16 Mar 2007 Subject: Re: Firefox 2.0's printing On Wed, Mar 14, 2007 at 04:18:19AM -0400, Michael Leuchtenburg wrote: > Oh, and to make things better, the print preview isn't an accurate > picture of the way things actually print. That would be way too > fucking easy, wouldn't it? someone remind me again what font rendering library firefox is using again, and how all the modules are supposed to interact? pango, glitz, freetype, expat, fontconfig, cairo, pangocairo, Xrender... it's all a big amorphous slightly-incompatible-X-still-leaves-turds-on- my-xterms-when-I-scroll mess. haven't fonts been a solved problem for some time now?
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