This site will have limited functionality while we undergo maintenance to improve your experience. If an article doesn't solve your issue and you want to ask a question, we have our support community waiting to help you at @FirefoxSupport on Twitter and/r/firefox on Reddit.

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

Lolu chungechunge lwabekwa kunqolobane. Uyacelwa ubuze umbuzo omusha uma udinga usizo.

Firefox printing to Adobe PDF saves pages as images

  • 5 uphendule
  • 69 zinale nkinga
  • 15 views
  • Igcine ukuphendulwa ngu Rich Pasco

more options

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)

more options

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

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

more options

Thanks kizzx2. Perfect. fixed the issue!

more options

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?

more options

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.

Okulungisiwe ngu ari.meyer

more options

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