Problem printing some web sites

[KenK]

Anyone know why. more and more. web sites do not print fully? Annoyingly
often, only the first page prints. Pasting it to Word usually works, but
somtimes there are problems with any illustrations. This is with Firefox,
currently 19.0. XP Home.

TIA

 

[Paul]

Anyone know why. more and more. web sites do not print fully? Annoyingly
often, only the first page prints. Pasting it to Word usually works, but
somtimes there are problems with any illustrations. This is with Firefox,
currently 19.0. XP Home.

TIA

You can try the page here, but no guarantees.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Problems_printing_web_pages#Does_not_print_entire_page_content

The print engine in Firefox 2, is entirely different than the print
engine in Firefox 19. So it's not like they had 19 releases to
debug one approach and make it work well. They changed it
along the way. The first release of the new print engine,
was far from finished. So it wasn't like a thoroughly tested
branch of code, was folded in and "only a few bugs remained".
Users were subject to the raw edge of the development process.
I haven't been following the saga lately, and I can't tell you
whether they changed it again or not.

All I can tell you, is I have pages that don't print properly.
The pages all print, but the objects on the page may not be
fully rendered (solid colors implemented as empty rectangles).

I bet if Adobe wrote a print engine for them, it would work.

As for the Firefox code base, you should download the source
some time. It's absolutely huge (around 17000 files in the
one I downloaded?). I tried to debug printing, by compiling
a debug version of Firefox, and it was impossible to single
step at any level through the code, and make sense of it.
I could see several routines that seemed to be doing
the same things (sequentially) and the routines all looked
vaguely similar. It would probably have taken weeks to step
through the code at that level. I had to give up without
a solution. And the actual debug output emitted that way,
didn't really help me either.

In this picture, you can see my debug version of Firefox running.
The command prompt window in the lower left corner, contains
debug messages emitted by Firefox while it was printing.

http://img16.imageshack.us/img16/1456/v3628running.gif

As a "bonus offer", in that picture you can see an add-on
called PrintPDF. If you're bored, you could give that
a try. I haven't tested that lately either. There's no
reason for that to fix a missing page problem, but it
could change things like my "empty rectangle" problem.
Once you have a PDF file, print that using Acrobat Reader,
in the usual way.

Paul

 

[VanguardLH]

Anyone know why. more and more. web sites do not print fully? Annoyingly
often, only the first page prints. Pasting it to Word usually works, but
somtimes there are problems with any illustrations. This is with Firefox,
currently 19.0. XP Home.

And the URL for an example web page is ...?

Perhaps the web page is dynamically generated by scripts up on the
server. Each time you retrieve the page, the server-side scripts decide
what content you will get, like changing ads or adjusting content based
on the time of day. A print function inside the web browser may try to
re-retrieve the web page (so it has a current or fresh copy) but it
won't run the scripts to generate [all of] the web page. I have seen,
for example, during printing an error pop up that something could not be
retrieved for the document (web page). You get an error because the
print engine cannot retrieve all of the web page's content. The web
page is dynamic and not oriented to a static version viable for
printing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_web_page

Instead of using the File -> Print menu or a Print toolbar button, see
if using the File -> Print Preview menu lets you print okay. You'll
often notice what is shown in the preview doesn't exactly match what you
see rendered inside the web browser's window. You only get the static
pieces of the web page.

For example, go to:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2604952/how-can-i-convert-a-dynamic-web-page-to-pdf

and use the File -> Print Preview menu. Notice all the right-frame
content is missing. It's in a separate frame or div(ision) from the one
that has focus that you will end up printing. You also lose all the
pretty formatting separating the posts in the discussion.

 

[J. P. Gilliver (John)]

In message <[email protected]>, Paul <[email protected]>
writes:
[]

All I can tell you, is I have pages that don't print properly.
The pages all print, but the objects on the page may not be
fully rendered (solid colors implemented as empty rectangles).

[]
That's not the setting (something like page setup, or used to be, IIRR)
that lets you turn off some backgrounds and fills to (a) save ink (b)
improve legibility of printouts, is it? I've been caught out by
forgetting that one more than once ...
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/<1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

"The boffins think the artists ... frivolous, living off the hard graft of those
who... create the comfortable ... life that makes the money for art possible.
The artist ... look ... down on the scientists as dull mechanics, ... worthy but
lacking the spiritual dimension ..." (Polly Toynbee, Radio Times 8-14 May 1999.)

 

[Ken Springer]

Anyone know why. more and more. web sites do not print fully? Annoyingly
often, only the first page prints. Pasting it to Word usually works, but
somtimes there are problems with any illustrations. This is with Firefox,
currently 19.0. XP Home.

I've used Firefox since version 3.x, and it's always had a problem with
certain pages. And, it's still the same. :-(

I used to complain about it in Mozilla's Firefox newsgroup, and all I'd
get is the page is malformed or some other reason. It didn't matter to
them that no other browser had no problem.

Here's a page FF cannot print correctly:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/300415

Internet Explorer has no problem with this site, neither does Safari,
Opera and iCab, Mac versions, have any problem.

Personally, I don't think Mozilla cares.

--
Ken

Mac OS X 10.8.2
Firefox 18.0.2
Thunderbird 17.0.2
LibreOffice 3.6.5.2

 

[Paul]

I've used Firefox since version 3.x, and it's always had a problem with
certain pages. And, it's still the same. :-(

I used to complain about it in Mozilla's Firefox newsgroup, and all I'd
get is the page is malformed or some other reason. It didn't matter to
them that no other browser had no problem.

Here's a page FF cannot print correctly:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/300415

Internet Explorer has no problem with this site, neither does Safari,
Opera and iCab, Mac versions, have any problem.

Personally, I don't think Mozilla cares.

Actually, there is a workaround for that.

If you have a print driver loaded, where the paper
tray selection allows humongous page sizes, the
"one page" bug of Firefox can be defeated. I have a
print driver, intended only for "print to file" type
printing, that I use for capturing web pages.

Here is your test link, printed in Firefox, using a
printer driver which supports a 24" x 108" page size.
There is also a 36" x 108" option, but that isn't needed
in this case. The page size limit is partially defined
by the 32Kx32K coordinate limits of PostScript ? So it
can't "go to infinity" or anything. There's an upper limit
defined by PostScript. We had one of the plotters that had those
paper options at work, which is where I first learned
about it. An inkjet with 36" wide paper, and the roll of
paper for it was a couple hundred bucks.

http://img201.imageshack.us/img201/6113/kenprint.gif

(Note - when the page renders, right click on the white surface
and select "Save". I don't think Firefox can handle this in terms
of showing the image. It's just too big. You'll need some
decent tool to view it. I used the GIMP for a look, as the
Windows preview gets bogged down.)

The print driver used is "HP DesignJet 750C/PS", which
prints to PostScript. The resulting print can be opened
in the free "GIMP" imaging program. In this case, GIMP
was set to convert at 300DPI, so the print would be legible.

The fun all started, with this package. Probably removed
from the HP site by now.

pl122en.exe 695,445 bytes
MD5SUM = 27c94497776a51491e38efd2f6131af1
SHA1SUM = ed785880acfb4a3817cf47a68887c07fa6dbbbb6

It would be a bit difficult to find a legit copy now. That
thing was first issued in 1996, and by various means, I've
loaded it in other OSes. It's possible you can extract
the PPD file from the installer, and use it with a
generic (unidrv) PostScript driver or something ?
I think I had a text file around somewhere, with my install
instructions (hack) for using it. But I can't find it now.

(Note - the CNET download probably shows up in a search first,
but at least their initial download is just a toolbar. You'd
probably have to "install" their crap, to get a second download
chance to get the actual file.)

Anyway, that's my (partial) solution. If the web page is
more than 108" long, I'm screwed

You can also scroll and "Print Screen" to get the whole
web page, and piece it together in an image editor. There's
always some kind of solution out there.

I can also pop that printout (Postscript format) into Acrobat
Distiller, and make a PDF file. Which may be useful if attempting
to copy and paste the text out of the printout.

Paul