PDF displayed in landscape, still prints in portrait.
I'm trying again to convert from Chrome to Firefox. One thing held me back in prior attempts, and that's the printing.
At work, when I use Chrome, when a PDF document comes up in landscape, I can hit 'Print' and it will send it to the printer in landscape. But in Firefox, it will send it to the printer in portrait and is shrunk to fit. In order to get it to do this correctly, I have to go into the print settings and change it to landscape. It will retain my settings, which helps when printing multiple landscape-oriented documents. But it's a pain the next time a portrait one comes up, because it will send it to the printer as a landscape and scaled to fit. I then have to go back, change the setting again, and re-print.
My major complaint with this is that I don't face any of this issue in Chrome or even on Edge. This seems like it would be an easy fix, so I'm hoping I'm just missing something.
Thanks in advance!
All Replies (6)
Just wanted to bump this to see if I'm missing something obvious.
So is it opening in FF or what is opening the pdf file?
I see this, too. Firefox's PDF viewer doesn't customize the page orientation based on the content, it just uses whatever you last used for printing either a web page or another PDF (set in Page Setup, which you can access on the File menu).
There is a longstanding bug to address this (Issue 2851); I don't know what the holdup is. Maybe the PDF viewer component (PDF.js) has a hard time learning the current page setup from Firefox?
There is a setting to rotate pages within the PDF whose orientation differs from the first. So if, hypothetically, Firefox was set to print portrait and the first page of the PDF is portrait and subsequent pages are landscape, the landscape pages are automatically rotated (example). BUT that preference doesn't help when all pages are landscape. If you think it might be useful anyway:
(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter/Return. Click the button promising to be careful or accepting the risk.
(2) In the search box above the list, type or paste pdfjs and pause while the list is filtered
(3) Double-click the pdfjs.enablePrintAutoRotate preference to switch the value from false to true
So where does that leave us. Either we need to change orientation manually, or, perhaps best in most cases, open the PDF in Adobe Reader/Acrobat or other external viewer for printing.
Thanks jscher. I was wondering if I'd need to just move to an external browser at some point. Looks like I'm at that point.
I guess the frustration is that the other major browsers don't have this issue. Oh well I guess. Thanks for chiming in!
Firefox has been using a PDF.js reader that Mozilla created using only JavaScript about 6 years ago, that was put in Firefox before (IMO) it was completed. Further development of PDF.js was planned but it still isn't complete as far as the original goals.
Not sure when it will happen, but I recall reading somewhere on a Mozilla website that the integrated PDF viewer that was developed back in 2010 for Google Chrome would be making its way into Firefox in 2018. Didn't bookmark that article and can't find it by a search of Mozilla domains now, so I don't know of the projected date or it that is "still on".
Hi the-edmeister, these are some recent discussions on incorporating the other PDF viewer... seems like slow progress.