Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 479450
PDF produced by Firefox Print to File is unusable (blurry) when printed
Last modified: 2018-04-11 07:14:46 EDT
When a page is saved using "Print -> Print to file" as a PDF, if that file is later printed the printed output is unusable - it appears very blurry. At a guess, something is up with the resolution? However, then the PDF is viewed on screen using evince, it seems to scale fine - go up to e.g. 200% and there's no blurriness (the text looks a bit wonky, but that looks like a font kerning problem). Similarly if the same page is printed directly (not via print to file) is comes out fine. An example PDF is attached (the fedoraproject.org homepage). When printed all the text in this PDF is blurry and hard to read, with the copyright text at the bottom so bard it's illegible. Printing the same page directly results in readable text (the images are missing, but I think that's a different bug!). A related question/worry: I've a large number of documents saved in this way (as PDF) built up over several months, but having only just tried printing one, are these PDFs permanently broken? Is there anything that can be done to fix them up for printing?
Created attachment 328575 [details] Example problematic PDF output produced by Firefox
Sorry, should have said: firefox-3.0.5-1.fc10.i386
Seems to be better in rawhide (firefox 3.1 beta).
1) is there a clean way to install 3.1b alongside 3.0.5 or to cleanly revert back to 3.0.5 after testing on F10? 2) can anything be done to fix up PDFs produced with this problem (to which I guess the root question is: what's wrong with them?)
Yes, just unpack the upstream binary (from http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html) to any directory and run ./firefox (make backup of your ~/.mozilla directory before that).
Confirmed that output prints clearly from 3.1b. Also marking as a duplicate of bug #450567, which I discovered via: http://cworth.org/cairo/a_chain_of_bugs/ I have a large number of defective PDFs produced by Firefox, so I'd still like to better understand what's wrong with them - ultimately with the hope that they can be fixed up. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 450567 ***