Need help with major printing malfunction

[Ronald F. Guilmette]

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.