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Print to PDF as text

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I've been using PDFcreator for years. Just recently, when I print to PDF from Firefox, it has started producing PDFs that do not contain searchable text (ie where the text from the webpage becomes a raster image).

PDFcreator still works properly with all other software (including Chrome). Can anyone recommend a way I can make Firefox start behaving itself?

Thanks!

I've been using PDFcreator for years. Just recently, when I print to PDF from Firefox, it has started producing PDFs that do not contain searchable text (ie where the text from the webpage becomes a raster image). PDFcreator still works properly with all other software (including Chrome). Can anyone recommend a way I can make Firefox start behaving itself? Thanks!

All Replies (9)

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That is odd. The builtin Microsoft Print to PDF works correctly. Does PDFcreator give you features that the builtin does not have?

If you go to "about:config" in your browser and search for "print.printer" you should see a bunch of special PDFcreator settings. If you take a screenshot of those, we can let you know if one of those is likely to fix the problem.

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Thanks for getting back to me. The settings from that printer are as follows (too many to fit into a screenshot):

print.printer_Your_friendly_PDF_creator.print_bgcolor false print.printer_Your_friendly_PDF_creator.print_bgimages false print.printer_Your_friendly_PDF_creator.print_duplex 0 print.printer_Your_friendly_PDF_creator.print_edge_bottom 0 print.printer_Your_friendly_PDF_creator.print_edge_left 0 print.printer_Your_friendly_PDF_creator.print_edge_right 0 print.printer_Your_friendly_PDF_creator.print_edge_top 0 print.printer_Your_friendly_PDF_creator.print_evenpages true print.printer_Your_friendly_PDF_creator.print_footercenter print.printer_Your_friendly_PDF_creator.print_footerleft &PT print.printer_Your_friendly_PDF_creator.print_footerright &D print.printer_Your_friendly_PDF_creator.print_headercenter print.printer_Your_friendly_PDF_creator.print_headerleft &T print.printer_Your_friendly_PDF_creator.print_headerright &U print.printer_Your_friendly_PDF_creator.print_in_color true print.printer_Your_friendly_PDF_creator.print_margin_bottom 0.5 print.printer_Your_friendly_PDF_creator.print_margin_left 0.5 print.printer_Your_friendly_PDF_creator.print_margin_right 0.5 print.printer_Your_friendly_PDF_creator.print_margin_top 0.5 print.printer_Your_friendly_PDF_creator.print_oddpages true print.printer_Your_friendly_PDF_creator.print_orientation 0 print.printer_Your_friendly_PDF_creator.print_page_delay 50 print.printer_Your_friendly_PDF_creator.print_paper_data 9 print.printer_Your_friendly_PDF_creator.print_paper_height -1.00 print.printer_Your_friendly_PDF_creator.print_paper_name print.printer_Your_friendly_PDF_creator.print_paper_size_unit 1 print.printer_Your_friendly_PDF_creator.print_paper_width -1.00 print.printer_Your_friendly_PDF_creator.print_resolution 600 print.printer_Your_friendly_PDF_creator.print_reversed false print.printer_Your_friendly_PDF_creator.print_scaling 1.00 print.printer_Your_friendly_PDF_creator.print_shrink_to_fit true print.printer_Your_friendly_PDF_creator.print_to_file false print.printer_Your_friendly_PDF_creator.print_to_filename print.printer_Your_friendly_PDF_creator.print_unwriteable_margin_bottom 0 print.printer_Your_friendly_PDF_creator.print_unwriteable_margin_left 0 print.printer_Your_friendly_PDF_creator.print_unwriteable_margin_right 0 print.printer_Your_friendly_PDF_creator.print_unwriteable_margin_top 0

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Also just tested and, for me, interestingly Microsoft Print to PDF is producing the same problem.

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If it's happening on a variety of web pages for both PDF printers, then I have one thing you can try. Does it work if you change "gfx.text.disable-aa" to true in about:config?

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Afraid that didn't fix it!

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In today's GiveawayOfTheDay offer for novaPDF Lite I did a little test in answering someone else's question that, for the first time, revealed to me a difference between "printing to PDF" using Firefox vs. MS Edge (and Wordpad) which I chose simply as an alternative.

https://www.giveawayoftheday.com/novapdf-10-6/

(commenting as "HMarx")

I was surprised to accidentally discover that the PDF files originating from Firefox had no selectable/searchable text and (as of today) were basically just multi-page/linked image files.

I'd sure prefer that Firefox output text-searchable/selectable PDF files.

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I just discovered a workaround:

I have Print Edit WE installed as an extension (which currently is greyed out as "cannot be used with this page"... huh, I wonder why...) that on the aforementioned web page at GiveawayOfTheDay works to save it as a PDF file containing selectable/searchable text.

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FF75.0 (64-bit), win7P, Acrobat Distiller 9.0.0 (pdf print driver). Hope the devs can fix this issue... My problem of printing text as raster image is not always, mostly it is vector font, I notice the text is sometimes a vector image(not text font). I haven't spent time like, seeing if same web page later prints same. My best workaround is to copy & paste into html editor (ms.word), far from perfect but at least I can copy links etc...

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GKW said

Also just tested and, for me, interestingly Microsoft Print to PDF is producing the same problem.

I have the same problem: neither the PDF printer provided by Adobe Acrobat XI (which is already on the system) nor the Microsoft Print to PDF create searchable PDFs.

When I copy the same link into Chrome and do print to PDF, I get a searchable PDF.

I am using FF 76.0.1 on Windows 10.