Re: [gentoo-user] Print quality unreadable in Firefox

[Dale]

Peter Humphrey wrote:
> On Thursday 25 February 2016 02:12:16 Dale wrote:
>
>>  What is this font group switching thingy?
> Eselect fontconfig list
>


Interesting.  A whole bunch of mine was not enabled.  I fixed it.  I'm
glad I read some threads that I can't help on.  I had forgot all about
this but do seem to recall reading about it ages ago. 

Thanks.

Dale

:-)  :-) 

Re: [gentoo-user] Print quality unreadable in Firefox

[Peter Humphrey]

On Thursday 25 February 2016 02:12:16 Dale wrote:

>  What is this font group switching thingy?

Eselect fontconfig list

-- 
Rgds
Peter

Re: [gentoo-user] Print quality unreadable in Firefox

[Dale]

Daniel Frey wrote:
> On 02/23/2016 07:40 PM, Michael Orlitzky wrote:
>> On 02/23/2016 09:43 PM, Daniel Frey wrote:
>>> Lo and behold, it's not showing a bitmap font now:
>>>
>>> -
>>> # fc-match helvetica
>>> n019003l.pfb: "Nimbus Sans L" "Regular"
>>> -
>>>
>>> I don't know if the font mapping is correct, but I refreshed a page on
>>> bugs.g.o and I can print to PDF without the blocky fonts! So I don't
>>> really care if the font mapping is correct now. I can print again! :-)
>>>
>> Amazing, I guess I can stop bringing a JPEG of my boarding pass to the
>> airport now.
>>
>>
> >>> SNIP>>>
> I didn't even know you could use eselect to toggle
> font groups until yesterday, and I've been using gentoo since 2003... I
> figured if you installed fonts it would use them but that's not the case!
>
> Oh well, learn something new every day. Now I just have to remember the
> old thing I forgot because of this new thing I learned... sigh.
>
>

Huh?  What is this font group switching thingy?  I been using Gentoo for
about as long as you and I've never heard of such a thing either.  Of
course, I rarely print anything either.  Right now, I'm trying to figure
out if this third cartridge to go bad in a few days of use is a
cartridge problem or a printer rolling up with all four feet in the
air.  Hard to believe a cartridge can go bad that fast. 

Dale

:-)  :-) 

Re: [gentoo-user] Print quality unreadable in Firefox

[Daniel Frey]

On 02/23/2016 07:40 PM, Michael Orlitzky wrote:
> On 02/23/2016 09:43 PM, Daniel Frey wrote:
>>
>> Lo and behold, it's not showing a bitmap font now:
>>
>> -
>> # fc-match helvetica
>> n019003l.pfb: "Nimbus Sans L" "Regular"
>> -
>>
>> I don't know if the font mapping is correct, but I refreshed a page on
>> bugs.g.o and I can print to PDF without the blocky fonts! So I don't
>> really care if the font mapping is correct now. I can print again! :-)
>>
> 
> Amazing, I guess I can stop bringing a JPEG of my boarding pass to the
> airport now.
> 
> 

Yeah, That was my other solution: screenshots. It was getting to be a
pain in the arse, but apparently not quite enough of a pain as it took
me two years to finally get around to fixing it.

What made me realize what was happening was looking at the source for
bugs.g.o and seeing it was asking for Helvetica. I noticed it wasn't
installed, then I googled for how to search fonts which led me to
fc-match, which then led to googling Helvetica for gentoo, which led to
liberation-fonts. I didn't even know you could use eselect to toggle
font groups until yesterday, and I've been using gentoo since 2003... I
figured if you installed fonts it would use them but that's not the case!

Oh well, learn something new every day. Now I just have to remember the
old thing I forgot because of this new thing I learned... sigh.

Re: [gentoo-user] Print quality unreadable in Firefox

[Michael Orlitzky]

On 02/23/2016 09:43 PM, Daniel Frey wrote:
> 
> Lo and behold, it's not showing a bitmap font now:
> 
> -
> # fc-match helvetica
> n019003l.pfb: "Nimbus Sans L" "Regular"
> -
> 
> I don't know if the font mapping is correct, but I refreshed a page on
> bugs.g.o and I can print to PDF without the blocky fonts! So I don't
> really care if the font mapping is correct now. I can print again! :-)
> 

Amazing, I guess I can stop bringing a JPEG of my boarding pass to the
airport now.

Re: [gentoo-user] Print quality unreadable in Firefox

[Daniel Frey]

On 02/23/2016 12:41 PM, Thomas Doczkal wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> has someone found a solution for this? I currently have the same issue
> on a Laptop with Arch Linux whereas I don't experience this on my Gentoo
> Desktop machine.
> 
> Would be great if someone could point me in the right direction.
> 

I finally figured it out! It took me a few days.

I found out that the Helvetica font was being mapped to a bitmap font:

-
$ fc-match helvetica
helvR12-ISO8859-1.pcf.gz: "Helvetica" "Regular"
-

I was scratching my head here.

Make sure you have media-fonts/liberation-fonts installed (supposed
replacement for some MS TTF fonts):

-
# emerge -pv liberation-fonts

These are the packages that would be merged, in order:

Calculating dependencies... done!
[ebuild   R] media-fonts/liberation-fonts-2.00.1-r1::gentoo  USE="X
-fontforge" 0 KiB

Total: 1 package (1 reinstall), Size of downloads: 0 KiB
-

Then enable liberation-fonts, disable the bitmap fonts. I also rebuilt
the font cache:

# eselect fontconfig enable 60-liberation.conf
# eselect fontconfig enable 70-no-bitmaps.conf
# fc-cache -fv
-

Now my fontconfig looks like this:

-
# eselect fontconfig list
Available fontconfig .conf files (* is enabled):
  [1]   10-autohint.conf
  [2]   10-no-sub-pixel.conf
  [3]   10-scale-bitmap-fonts.conf *
  [4]   10-sub-pixel-bgr.conf
  [5]   10-sub-pixel-rgb.conf
  [6]   10-sub-pixel-vbgr.conf
  [7]   10-sub-pixel-vrgb.conf
  [8]   10-unhinted.conf
  [9]   11-lcdfilter-default.conf
  [10]  11-lcdfilter-legacy.conf
  [11]  11-lcdfilter-light.conf
  [12]  20-unhint-small-dejavu-sans-mono.conf
  [13]  20-unhint-small-dejavu-sans.conf
  [14]  20-unhint-small-dejavu-serif.conf
  [15]  20-unhint-small-vera.conf *
  [16]  25-unhint-nonlatin.conf
  [17]  30-metric-aliases.conf *
  [18]  30-urw-aliases.conf *
  [19]  40-nonlatin.conf *
  [20]  42-luxi-mono.conf *
  [21]  45-latin.conf *
  [22]  49-sansserif.conf *
  [23]  50-user.conf *
  [24]  51-local.conf *
  [25]  57-dejavu-sans-mono.conf
  [26]  57-dejavu-sans.conf
  [27]  57-dejavu-serif.conf
  [28]  60-latin.conf *
  [29]  60-liberation.conf *
  [30]  65-fonts-persian.conf *
  [31]  65-khmer.conf
  [32]  65-nonlatin.conf *
  [33]  69-unifont.conf *
  [34]  70-no-bitmaps.conf *
  [35]  70-yes-bitmaps.conf
  [36]  80-delicious.conf *
  [37]  90-roboto-regular.conf
  [38]  90-synthetic.conf *
  [39]  99pdftoopvp.conf
-

Lo and behold, it's not showing a bitmap font now:

-
# fc-match helvetica
n019003l.pfb: "Nimbus Sans L" "Regular"
-

I don't know if the font mapping is correct, but I refreshed a page on
bugs.g.o and I can print to PDF without the blocky fonts! So I don't
really care if the font mapping is correct now. I can print again! :-)

Dan

Re: [gentoo-user] Print quality unreadable in Firefox

[Thomas Doczkal]

On 02/20/2016 04:54 PM, Daniel Frey wrote:
> On 02/19/2016 02:04 PM, Dutch Ingraham wrote:
>> I had the same problem.  In my use-case, changing my print driver from
>> PCL/CUPS to Gutenprint solved the issue.
>>
>> I have the feeling this was specific to my set-up and printer, though it
>> might be worth looking at.
>>
> 
> Gutenprint doesn't support my printer, so I won't be able to try that. I
> currently use foo2zjs. I don't suspect the print driver though, as
> Firefox is the only application that has this print problem.
> 
> I did try changing the fonts in Firefox but that made no difference.
> 
> Dan
> 
Hi,

has someone found a solution for this? I currently have the same issue
on a Laptop with Arch Linux whereas I don't experience this on my Gentoo
Desktop machine.

Would be great if someone could point me in the right direction.

Many thanks.

Best regards,
Thomas



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Re: [gentoo-user] Print quality unreadable in Firefox

[Daniel Frey]

On 02/19/2016 02:04 PM, Dutch Ingraham wrote:
> I had the same problem.  In my use-case, changing my print driver from
> PCL/CUPS to Gutenprint solved the issue.
> 
> I have the feeling this was specific to my set-up and printer, though it
> might be worth looking at.
> 

Gutenprint doesn't support my printer, so I won't be able to try that. I
currently use foo2zjs. I don't suspect the print driver though, as
Firefox is the only application that has this print problem.

I did try changing the fonts in Firefox but that made no difference.

Dan

Re: [gentoo-user] Print quality unreadable in Firefox

[Dutch Ingraham]

On Fri, Feb 19, 2016 at 11:20:12PM +0200, Alon Bar-Lev wrote:
> On 19 February 2016 at 23:13, Daniel Frey  wrote:
> >
> > I have been having a problem printing in Firefox for quite some time. It
> > seems fonts are being rendered in an unreadable way, but it doesn't
> > always do this.
> >
> > I've also noticed that Firefox is the only application that does this:
> > LibreOffice, various PDF readers, etc are all printing fine.
> >
> > I was able to print the invoice I needed by selecting, copying & pasting
> > into LibreOffice (which even retained the formatting.)
> >
> > Firefox even does this while printing to PDF, so I've attached a small
> > sample of search results from bugs.g.o. (TestPrint-BadQuality.pdf)
> >
> > Has anyone seen this and know how to fix it? I've been wading through
> > search results for almost an hour and found nothing.
> >
> > Dan
> 
> I can confirm this happens to me as well, something related to fixed
> width font I guess. But as I can never actually make firefox print
> what I actually see, I usually give up and just copy content manually.
> 
I had the same problem.  In my use-case, changing my print driver from
PCL/CUPS to Gutenprint solved the issue.

I have the feeling this was specific to my set-up and printer, though it
might be worth looking at.

Re: [gentoo-user] Print quality unreadable in Firefox

[Alon Bar-Lev]

On 19 February 2016 at 23:13, Daniel Frey  wrote:
>
> I have been having a problem printing in Firefox for quite some time. It
> seems fonts are being rendered in an unreadable way, but it doesn't
> always do this.
>
> I've also noticed that Firefox is the only application that does this:
> LibreOffice, various PDF readers, etc are all printing fine.
>
> I was able to print the invoice I needed by selecting, copying & pasting
> into LibreOffice (which even retained the formatting.)
>
> Firefox even does this while printing to PDF, so I've attached a small
> sample of search results from bugs.g.o. (TestPrint-BadQuality.pdf)
>
> Has anyone seen this and know how to fix it? I've been wading through
> search results for almost an hour and found nothing.
>
> Dan

I can confirm this happens to me as well, something related to fixed
width font I guess. But as I can never actually make firefox print
what I actually see, I usually give up and just copy content manually.