Help me Gecko! (was: Re: Need help with major printing malfunction)

[Guido Falsi]

On Wed, Sep 02, 2009 at 04:12:14PM -0700, Ronald F. Guilmette wrote:
> This does not appear to explain the problem(s) I'm having.  Rather, it
> appears that the Postscript (level 3) being generated by the Firefox on
> my system is just really really messed up.
> 
> I say this because I have been experimenting around, and I just ``printed''
> a particular web page (https://www.monoprice.com/home/myaccount.asp) to a
> disk file and then I tried to view that using ghostview/ghostscript and
> the text of the ``printed'' page is *still* entirely hosed.
> 
> See for yourself!  Here is the web URL again:
> 
>    https://www.monoprice.com/home/myaccount.asp
> 
> and here is the Firefox-printed version of that same page:
> 
>    http://www.tristatelogic.com/misc/monoprice.ps
> 
> Please _do_ try looking at that with any kind of postscript-aware thing
> you have available to you (e.g. ghostview) and you'll see that the text
> is *seriously* messed up to the point where it is entirely unreadable.
> 
> NOTE:  My installed versions of ghostview/ghostscript are:
> 
> 	ghostscript-gpl-8.62_3
> 	ghostview-1.5_2
> 
> I am assuming that these tools *do* know how to properly process Postscript
> level 3 documents... such as the kind that are allegedly coming out of
> Firefox when one tries to printe a web page... so if I look at the ``printed''
> file with these tools, and if the pages are still all messed up (as they are)
> then it must be because Forefox itself is just plain outputting garbage, right?
> 
> So I'm back to square one, and I still need to know:  How do I debug this
> problem?

I see. I was loking better at my prints and I also notice some problems
with certain fonts. It loks like a font problem to me. Like some font
commonly used in web pages is rendered in print by some bitmap or
missing font by firefox.

In your case the problem is exacerbated...For some reason I really don't
understand.

> P.S.  To be honest, it is stunning to me that whoever did the port of Firefox
> 3.5.1 to FreeBSD allowed that port to make it into the ports tree when, it
> seems, the bleepin' thing can't even print a simple web page.
> 
> (And by the way, who is "gecko at FreeBSD.org" anyway?  Is that a real person,
> or just a role?)

It's a mailing list. So a group of people(of which I'm not part, I'm
just subscribed to the list).

-- 
Guido Falsi <mad at madpilot.net>