Firefox3 printing woes

[Ronald F. Guilmette]

In message <hjqkum$2p8s$1 at lorvorc.mips.inka.de>, 
naddy at mips.inka.de (Christian Weisgerber) wrote:

>Ronald F. Guilmette <rfg at tristatelogic.com> wrote:
>
>> Would any of you chaps happen to have any suggestions for solving the
>> firefox3 garbled fonts printing problem?
>
>The problem is that various web sites (e.g. aircanada.com) apparently
>specify fonts narrowly by name, and if a commercial font such as
>"Arial" isn't available, Firefox somehow ends up substituting these
>terrible bitmapped fonts.

Obviously, that's kinda dumb.

>I don't know why this only affects printing.

Yes.  That _is_ mighty strange that it knows how to propery render the fonts
on-screen, but then forgets how to do that when it comes to printing.

>OpenBSD works around this by adding this etc/fonts/conf.d file to map
>common commercial fonts to their Bitstream Vera equivalents:
>http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/xenocara/lib/fontconfig/conf.d/31-nonmst
>.conf?rev=1.2
>
>I guess many people simply install the Microsoft fonts
>(ports/x11-fonts/webfonts), which I understand also solves this.

THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU!  Seriously, I can't thank you enough for
these two suggestions.  This problem has been causing me serious annoyance
for at least a year now, and none of the other suggested fixes that I found
on the web worked.

An interesting observation:  My primary test case was the home page of a
web site that some other fellow (in the UK) had seen and that was causing
him the same problem, i.e. http://www.thepensionservice.gov.uk/

So anyway, I first just implemented the second of your two suggested fixes
above.  That caused the text of www.thepensionservice.gov.uk itself to print
properly, *however* (and very bizzarely) the firefox-added headers & footers
that were also printed on the same page were still looking quite awful.  (Same
problem... horrid font.)

So after that, I also implemented the first of your two suggested fixes
(adding a new conf.d/31-nonmst.conf file) and then tried printing again.
Volia!  Now _everything_ is printing properly... both the web page text
itself and also the firefox-added headers & footers.

I am a very happy camper, and I thank you again most humbly.

>> I've tried the various suggested fixes, to wit:
>> ...
>This is all obvious nonsense.

Yes, apparently all those other suggested fixes were indeed quite useless.


Regards,
rfg


P.S.  I'm going to submit a PR on this.  I guess that whoever reviews that
PR can just close it if the problem has already been addressed.  (But at
least the Proper Solution will make it into the Official Record.)