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print fonts

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When you try to print it from FF or Chrome to a virtual printer (pdfFactory), the entire page in curves - text can not be selected. The same when printing from IE11 - everything is OK, any text can be selected. This problem was on many sites - removing skia from direct2d1.1,skia,cairo, as well as disabling hardware acceleration, brought results, but as it turned out, not for all sites (example: https://www.beboss.ru/kn/klgd/2857395). Tried gfx.content.azure.enabled set to false and gfx.direct2d.disabled to true, though, if I'm not mistaken, these settings should have given the same result as those described above. HOW to win??

FF 60.3.0 esr

and in General, maybe there is a more radical solution? so the acceleration works and the fonts are okay?

When you try to print it from FF or Chrome to a virtual printer (pdfFactory), the entire page in curves - text can not be selected. The same when printing from IE11 - everything is OK, any text can be selected. This problem was on many sites - removing skia from direct2d1.1,skia,cairo, as well as disabling hardware acceleration, brought results, but as it turned out, not for all sites (example: https://www.beboss.ru/kn/klgd/2857395). Tried gfx.content.azure.enabled set to false and gfx.direct2d.disabled to true, though, if I'm not mistaken, these settings should have given the same result as those described above. HOW to win?? FF 60.3.0 esr and in General, maybe there is a more radical solution? so the acceleration works and the fonts are okay?

All Replies (7)

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Hi iam_alex, another pdfFactory user here.

The problem occurs when downloadable fonts are used for large sections of the page. If the site only uses downloadable fonts for headers or pull quotes, you still get text PDFs instead of images.

There is a setting to block downloadable fonts, but that will break sites that use icon-based fonts for their buttons. You can experiment and see what you think:

(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter/Return. Click the button promising to be careful or accepting the risk.

(2) In the search box above the list, type or paste gfx.d and pause while the list is filtered

(3) Double-click the gfx.downloadable_fonts.enabled preference to switch the value from true to false

If I'm trying to print a page without downloadable fonts, I may manually remove the relevant style rules, but that's rather picky work, so an add-on solution -- if any exists -- would make more sense than what I do.

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Hi, jscher2000! I did everything as you described, and it didn't work (

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it may be necessary to clean something in FF?

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Did you notice the fonts change after that? You might need to reload the page bypassing the cache (Ctrl+Shift+r) after disabling font downloading since the fonts are already present in the cache.

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Yes, the fonts have changed visually. However, the point seems not to be in this parameter (gfx.downloadable_fonts.enabled) - at first I did not pay attention - and perhaps not even the fonts. So, if you print a page from my example, even if the specified parameter is left by default, then on pages 2 and 3 you can select the text, but on pages 1 and 4 it is impossible, all in curves...

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and for example here - https://www.beboss.ru/kn/nkz/2803537 -the text is closed by a certain drop-down piece. maybe it's in any scripts or something like that?

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Fonts are the most common issue, but there are a lot of strange print bugs. For example, another thing that can cause Firefox to print a page to PDF as an image is if the designer assigned a drop-shadow to large areas of the page. For example: https://bug906379.bmoattachments.org/attachment.cgi?id=791817

I wish I had a comprehensive solution, but I don't.