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Firefox printing to Adobe PDF saves pages as images

  • 5 cavab
  • 69 have this problem
  • 15 views
  • Last reply by Rich Pasco

sona
sona
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I like to save articles / webpages as PDF. The printer that i am using is the standard PDF printer that comes with Adobe Acrobat Professional version 9.4

Firefox prints to PDF pages as image files, whereas Internet Explorer etc is able to print pages as simple PDF where text etc can be selected.

Previous to this, i was having a huge problem in printing to PDF. I tried other PDF printers with the the same issue. The PC would just freeze etc if i tried to print to PDF from Firefox version 3.6 etc.

The PC is an Core i7 950 3.0GHZ with 6GB RAM, so not really an old PC.

I like to save articles / webpages as PDF. The printer that i am using is the standard PDF printer that comes with Adobe Acrobat Professional version 9.4 Firefox prints to PDF pages as image files, whereas Internet Explorer etc is able to print pages as simple PDF where text etc can be selected. Previous to this, i was having a huge problem in printing to PDF. I tried other PDF printers with the the same issue. The PC would just freeze etc if i tried to print to PDF from Firefox version 3.6 etc. The PC is an Core i7 950 3.0GHZ with 6GB RAM, so not really an old PC.

All Replies (5)

kizzx2
kizzx2
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I had the same problem. Here's how to fix it:

Go to "about:config", set "gfx.direct2d.disabled" to "true"

sona
sona Question owner
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Thanks kizzx2. Perfect. fixed the issue!

MacNimer
MacNimer
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thank you. it did work. after i spend hours in installing / uninstall PFD printer driver. removing firefox installing it again. just wondering how did you figure this one out?

ari.meyer
ari.meyer
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The setting "gfx.direct2d.disabled" is also toggled via Tools->Options->Advanced - General tab "Use hardware acceleration when available" (restart Firefox to have it take effect). I haven't noticed any degradation in graphics performance after disabling it, but I haven't tried anything really intensive.

Modified by ari.meyer

Rich Pasco
Rich Pasco
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I have the same problem, but for me, setting "gfx.direct2d.disabled" to "true" did not fix it: I still get image PDFs.

I'm using the "Adobe PDF" printer driver component of Adobe Acrobat 9.5 Pro under Windows XP.

My primary web browser is Mozilla Firefox 11.0 but I fall back on MS Internet Explorer 8.0 for testing.

A certain web page is mostly text. When I visit it with Firefox and print it to Adobe PDF, the resulting PDF file contains not the text as I would expect, but rather an image of the page. When I visit the same page with MSIE and print to Adobe PDF, the resulting PDF correctly contains the text of the page.

Here is one web page exhibiting this behavior:

http://www.aa.com/i18n/travelInformation/specialAssistance/serviceAnimals.jsp

Problems with the image-based PDF file from Firefox include:

1) It is four times larger than MSIE's text-based PDF. (333,828 bytes from Firefox vs 87,809 bytes for MSIE).

2) It looks fuzzy (blurry) both on-screen and when printed. If I zoom in, I can see JPEG artifacts around each letter.

3) It is impossible to select the text and copy it to the clipboard.

Why does this happen and how can it be fixed?

I am not sure whether the "fault" in this case lies with Firefox or with Acrobat, but since Acrobat does correctly generate a text-based PDF with MSIE, it seems fair to look to Firefox.

By the way, I reset Firefox printer setting as described here:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/Firefox%20prints%20incorrectly#w_res...

but it did not fix the problem,

- Rich