locked Firefox 3 prints garbage characters

Firefox version: 3.0 Operating system: Windows XP
Author
Message
Sheila Salo
Firefox user

I installed Firefox 3 yesterday. When I try to print from a web page I get garbage characters. For example, I printed the Firefox support main page. The top line, which should show the date, URL, etc, prints entirely in garbage. Likewise the heads to the columns show up as garbage. Other pages I have tried to print have printed entirely in garbage. Any ideas?

Plugins installed:


[+]


Fri 20 of Jun, 2008 11:16 PST  
Nosh
Firefox user

This worked for me....
Go to View>Character Encoding>Auto Detect and select Universal. Seemed to work for me... for now.



Wed 23 of Jul, 2008 09:03 PST  
Nosh
Firefox user

Ok... stopped working again. Unchecked saved and checked "Allow pages to choose there own fonts..." in Tools/Options and page prints correctly again.

shrug



Thu 24 of Jul, 2008 06:55 PST  
livejwl
Firefox user

I had the same issue with garbage characters showing up. After trying some of the above solutions this is what worked for me.

This worked for me. I am using a Lanier LD055 PCL6 printer.

When printing (File->Print)
Clicked on the Properties button.
Clicked the Print Quality tab
Deselected "Use Printer Fonts"

On the Lanier, this checkbox toggles whether the printer prints by using equivalent printer fonts for TrueType fonts.

Other fixes mentioned above that I tried with varying degrees of success:

I tried the three fixes (below) suggested in the posts above and they worked with varying levels of success and failure. Eg. Changing the default font from Times to Verdana worked except for portions of text that were PRE and CODE blocks.

In Tools/Options/Content/Fonts & Colors/Advanced
Uncheck "Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of my selections above"

In Tools/Options/Content/Fonts & Colors/Advanced
change the default character encoding from "Western (ISO 8859-1)" to "Western (Windows 1252)

In Tools/Options/Content/Fonts & Colors/Advanced
change the Serif font from Times New Roman to Verdana and the Monospace font Courier (from Courier New)


attachment printerfonts.png (44.00 Kb)

Thu 31 of Jul, 2008 11:24 PST  
PSA
Firefox user

I'm having this issue with pdf writer specifically. None of the suggestions given above have worked! Will have to use IE to print my pages.



Tue 12 of Aug, 2008 14:35 PST  
Loz
Firefox user

For information - this problem also applies to the virtual printer "Go2PDF". None of the above advice fixes it unfortunately. "Go2PDF" works fine in FF2 and Explorer 7.



Fri 22 of Aug, 2008 03:14 PST  
joe john
Firefox user

I thought firefox was supposed to be good?



Mon 25 of Aug, 2008 04:31 PST  
Paolo
Firefox user

one image worths a thousand words ....


attachment Dibujo.gif (72.78 Kb)

Tue 26 of Aug, 2008 14:32 PST  
Sheila Salo
Firefox user

Oh, for heaven's sakes. Now this forum is acting up. I cannot forward to the next page to see Paolo's message, "one image worth a thousand words..."



Wed 27 of Aug, 2008 05:30 PST  
Patrick Seher
Firefox user

Same problems here - i have many customer which cant use firefox 3 now! Mostly i have problem with NRG (Ricoh, Gestetner) Laserprinters, and as well with freepdfXP (based on ghostscript).

this is really a major bug!



Mon 01 of Sep, 2008 09:49 PST  
Scott
Firefox user

I am having the same problem with all of my computers that print to our Ricoh 3800 network printers. The only way that I have found to fix this is to install a postscript driver and print through it. That is not a big deal for on computer, but when I have to go around and install it on 300 computers, then it is a bit worse. :)



Thu 04 of Sep, 2008 05:30 PST  
Rod Rodgers
Firefox user

Still having problems with FireFox v3 and Adobe Acrobat Writer v5 and the printing of garbled, non-sense text. See attachment of this page.

Print to PDF v0.75 seems to work, but the output isn't as good and is not accessible from menuless screens.



Thu 04 of Sep, 2008 12:28 PST  
John Doe771
Firefox user
I had no luck with the above until I UNCHECKED the box which was allowing web pages to set their own character set. My monospaced font then stopped printing garbage. It looks like my CSS is saying that "courier" is the character set for 
 and for some reason monospaced text was printing as garbage.


Mon 08 of Sep, 2008 14:43 PST  
EsaV
Firefox user

Doing tricks mentioned here (changing default-font and coding) helps as long as I don't close firefox...it seems there is no solution easy enough for our web-app users so it's time to do some downgrading...



Thu 11 of Sep, 2008 08:27 PST  
tomarmga
1 posts

Subj: Display of WEBDINGS in FIREFOX

Firefox 3.0.1 - Win XP SP2

This version of Firefox also does not display WEBDINGS properly.

All small WEBDING bullet choice appears as an = (equal) sign.

Changing selections in font controls have NO effect.

Test pages are coded as UTF-8

Looks great in IE6-7 and MAC Safari



Fri 12 of Sep, 2008 13:19 PST  
kcho
Firefox user

By the way, I tried starting a new thread for this (as per the instructions), but the links to do so never worked.

I find that it is not just a printing problem, but that Firefox 3 does not *display* fixed-width fonts correctly. Instead of displaying as fixed-width (the way Courier does), it displays completely munged (the way, say, Helvetica does).

This is, tragically, a deal-breaker for me unless I can fix it, since I do a lot of work with guitar tabs in ASCII, which must have things line up correctly via use of Monaco & Courier. I have tried all the fixes above and none have fixed this problem. Does anyone have a fresh insight?

I would really hate to de-install Firefox. But this new version has problems which make it unusable for me, now.



Tue 23 of Sep, 2008 05:50 PST  
Donna Taylor
Firefox user

I think (notice I said “I think”) I might have my own problem solved and maybe someone else's problem, too. My problem was that in printing from File, Print Preview, my headers and footers were either in gibberish or in terrible printing that resembled something from an old dot matrix printer on draft . . . and . . . printing from certain web sites that had a “print” or “print this page” button or using my own “Ctrl+P” keystroke and then the whole page would be gibberish and would look like a foreign language printed in blocks or as one person stated, resembled oriental characters, sometimes one on top of the other.

In reading all these posts, I could see a pattern emerging. Since I had already some time ago tried the “reset the selected printer in your Firefox preferences” with no luck, I went to Tools/Options/Content/Fonts & Colors/Advanced and unchecked "Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of my selections above" and no luck there either, I changed the default character encoding (Tools > Options > Content > Font & Colors > Advanced...) from "Western (ISO 8859-1)" to "Western (Windows 1252)" and no luck there and changed it back.

I TRIED SUKHBIR'S ADVICE OF JULY 2, 2008, “Tools->options->content Fonts & color Option Change the Default Font : from Times New Roman to something else. I choose "Trebuchet MS" and size 14.” (These are Sukhbir's words.)

My default font was something else, so, clicking on “Advanced” taking me to the second page I changed the “Proportional” choice to “sans serif” and ARIAL popped in to the “Sans Serif” line two lines below. I used his "Trebuchet MS" and it shows up in the Serif line. I clicked OK and went back to the first page again to see the “default font”, it was showing ARIAL. I changed it to 14 point and everything is working great now.

My headers and footers are printing correctly now using the File, Print, Print Preview and most importantly, printing from the web pages that were giving me fits is now working. One of the pages giving me a huge problem was a page from the Social Security site detailing what items you needed and what you needed to do to secure a replacement Social Security card. Previously I had THREE pages of what looked like gibberish in capitalized letters and numbers and NOW I have ONE page printing correctly.

Hope this helps someone else. My solution is almost identical to Sukhbir's, with just a little change. At least I hope the solution keeps working!



Wed 24 of Sep, 2008 15:02 PST  
Guy J
Firefox user

I had the same issues but think I've found a fix.

Changed the Default character encoding from Western (ISO 8859-1) to Western (Windows - 1252) It seems to be working for now but we'll see over the long term.



Wed 24 of Sep, 2008 15:08 PST  
bro
Firefox user

Have tried ALL suggestion to no available.
Update 3.0.0.3 just installed - seems this PDF Writer bug doesn't have much of a priority... shame. Quite liked Firefox, and thought it was much better than IE.
Guess it's back to IE - at least MS test their product a bit better before they dump it on users. And have an option to uninstall an update...



Sat 27 of Sep, 2008 16:39 PST  
Derek Johnson
Firefox user

I had this problem on an SP2 XP machine.

I think this problem is being caused when the web is using the default font, and the chosen default font is not a scalable TrueType font.

I fixed it by entering

about:config

Then in the filter type "western"

Now ensure that all the selected fonts exist on your PC and are TrueType. (To change, right click the line then select "Modify".

NB I found that one font was MS SERIF. This is not TrueType (See C:\windows\fonts).
Changing this is Times New Roman (or anything but .FON type font) fixed the issue.
I could see straight away that the web page was rendered better when I used CRTL+Scroll to zoom in and out. The page then printed OK.

HTH

YMMV.


attachment Image1.jpg (29.35 Kb)

Fri 24 of Oct, 2008 08:28 PST  
Anonymous

I have a Ricoh printer (1045P) that will not print properly (mostly garbage) from Firefox or Chrome, but IE 7 & 8 handle all print jobs fine. (The Ricoh has a PCL6 driver and a RPCS driver but neither work. ) Chrome has the same problem as FF3.

But I have a HP 4800 Printer that prints fine from all three.

None of the solutions that I tried fix the Ricoh output.

My workaround is to launch IE and cut and past to IE when I need to print. I like Chrome best for surfing. This is very annoying.



Sun 26 of Oct, 2008 08:30 PST  
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