Firefox 104-107 has square box symptom and numerous dots on printouts instead of letters
Greetings. I waited a long time before updating from FF 88 to FF 104, concerned that the header and footer issues I previously experienced (and resolved) with FF's print preview interface would recur after updating to a newer FF version. Unfortunately after updating to FF 104 the very same issues recurred. The only solution was to disable FF's print preview interface once again and use the Mac print window instead for all printing tasks. Doing that solved the issue with headers and footers getting cut off pdfs and printed pages, but it did not solve two new issues that began after updating to FF 104, which have persisted through FF 107.
When printing emails and/or content from webpages, FF has been inserting what I believe is called square box symptom (multiple square boxes in a row with question marks in some of them) instead of the actual text that is on the email or webpage. FF is also printing a long series of dots across the page in certain areas of my emails, which I assume are the very bottom of the letters that are supposed to be there. These issues have never occurred in all my years as a Firefox user until updating to 104.
Does anyone else have these problems when printing emails and/or webpages? This behavior does not occur with every email or webpage that I print or save as a pdf, but it is prevalent enough that I am having to rely on Safari to create pdfs and/or printouts.
I've done everything I can think of to resolve these two new issues but the behaviors persist. I am attaching 2 screenshots of a recent order confirmation email that I saved as a pdf to demonstrate what the issues look like. The title of the email is cut off. All you can see is a bunch of tiny dots. The amount of the refund is nothing but dots. The title of each item in the order is a bunch of dots, as is the price on the far right. There is a row of square box symptom between some of the items in the order, followed by more missing titles and prices represented by dots, and more dots for the amount of the discount and subtotal.
I was going to submit a bug about this but wanted to inquire here first in case there is a solution that I have not tried. Clearing cookies, cache, and running Disk Utility has not resolved this. Any assistance you can give me is greatly appreciated. Thank you.
All Replies (2)
You see little boxes with the hex code of the character or text labels if you do not have a font installed that covers this Unicode range or block downloadable fonts or if you do not allow pages to choose their own fonts.
Small icons can be supplied by an iconic font that is downloaded from the server via @font-face CSS rules. If you have content blocking extensions then make sure that you do not block remote fonts. Also make sure you allow pages to choose their own fonts.
- Settings -> General: Fonts & Colors -> Advanced
[X] "Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of my selections above"
You can right-click and select "Inspect" to open the built-in Inspector with this element selected.
You can check in the Rules tab in the right panel in the Inspector what font-family is used for selected text. You can check in the Fonts tab in the right panel in the Inspector what font is actually used because Firefox might be using a different font than specified by the website.
Modified by cor-el
Thank you for your reply cor-el.
I do not have any extensions installed on FF. The Fonts Advanced setting is selected to allow pages to use their own fonts instead of my selections, just as it was before I updated.
I have an iMac desktop computer that I did not update so it is still using FF 88. I have to use that computer now to do all my printing since I cannot get a proper printout or pdf with my MacBook after updating to FF 104 and above. FF's font advanced settings are identical on both my computers. I am not having any squares with questions marks or numerous dots across printed pages instead of text when printing the very same emails with my iMac using FF 88. Everything prints normally.
TO CLARIFY: The two screenshots I attached of an order confirmation email are an example of how many of my emails look now after saving them as a pdf or printing them with FF 104 and above. When VIEWING my emails in hotmail/outlook.com webmail they look perfectly normal. There are no dots across the page instead of the text, or squares with question marks. Those issues appear when previewing the document in the Mac print window before saving the email as a pdf or printing it.
I tried to follow the rest of what you wrote with regard to the Inspector, but had great difficulty. The first link you provided says 404 Not Found. I figured out how to open the Inspector but the section that opens at the bottom is way too complicated for me to understand. Besides, if I am allowing pages to use their own fonts instead of my selections, is the information in the inspector section helpful? I don't know what to make of any of it.