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improper printing

  • 14 replies
  • 43 have this problem
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  • Last reply by pdani

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Quite often I come across sites like this

http://goldscents.blogspot.com/2011/02/energy-no-thanks.html

with some articles in them. I always use the 'print preview" before I print. On this one, what I get is: page 1 of 3: a page with several lines of heading - the rest of the page is blank page 2 of 3: the text starts, and gets chopped at the end of the page page 3 of 3: blank

Even an old piece of junk like IE8 works properly! I have other examples of this behavior - it isn't just the print preview, it actually prints like that too! I can never get the whole text. IE8 shows me 8 pages for this particular article.

Quite often I come across sites like this http://goldscents.blogspot.com/2011/02/energy-no-thanks.html with some articles in them. I always use the 'print preview" before I print. On this one, what I get is: page 1 of 3: a page with several lines of heading - the rest of the page is blank page 2 of 3: the text starts, and gets chopped at the end of the page page 3 of 3: blank Even an old piece of junk like IE8 works properly! I have other examples of this behavior - it isn't just the print preview, it actually prints like that too! I can never get the whole text. IE8 shows me 8 pages for this particular article.

Chosen solution

For me that page looks like it would print from IE8 on 3 sheets of letter size paper, if the Print Preview is set to Shrink to Fit.

There's a Bug in Firefox 3.6.13 and earlier versions (like all the way back to 2002) that keeps some pages from being complete in Print Preview and from being completely printed. That Bug is fixed in the Firefox 4.0 betas, the Print Preview shows all three pages when Shrink to Fit is selected - just like it shows three pages in IE8 when Shrink to Fit is selected.

Of course, if the author of that website used a "Printer Ready" CSS file to crop-out the subscriptions crap and "followers" stuff on that page, that a person who views that page probably wouldn't want on a print out anyways, that Bug in Firefox probably wouldn't be a problem.

Read this answer in context 👍 3

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Chosen Solution

For me that page looks like it would print from IE8 on 3 sheets of letter size paper, if the Print Preview is set to Shrink to Fit.

There's a Bug in Firefox 3.6.13 and earlier versions (like all the way back to 2002) that keeps some pages from being complete in Print Preview and from being completely printed. That Bug is fixed in the Firefox 4.0 betas, the Print Preview shows all three pages when Shrink to Fit is selected - just like it shows three pages in IE8 when Shrink to Fit is selected.

Of course, if the author of that website used a "Printer Ready" CSS file to crop-out the subscriptions crap and "followers" stuff on that page, that a person who views that page probably wouldn't want on a print out anyways, that Bug in Firefox probably wouldn't be a problem.

Modified by the-edmeister

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Thank you Sir you are indeed a scholar (and a Gentleman?)! I will wait a while longer for FF4 since I learned to live with this for quite a while - occasionally, if it's really important to me, I will fire up IE just for this. The article is indeed 3 pages - not sure why it showed me 8 at some point but then again I don't care much about IE. It's good to see I am not dreaming. As for trying to educate the authors about this issue - it's pretty hopeless. The problem exists in many places - I am surprised there hasn't been a stronger drive to fix it earlier.I am an older person and do not enjoy reading too much stuff off a screen, so I print many items and read at my leisure sitting or lying down.

Thanks again for your quick reply.

Dani

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I thought I wouldn't live long enough to see that Bug fixed. I too am an older person, just into my7th decade, born in the first half of the last century.

You're welcome.
Please mark this thread as solved.

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Well, at least it nice to know I'm not alone! I use a G4 Macintosh with OS 10.4.11 and the problem described exists on both Firefox 3.6.13 AND Camino 2.0.6. The bad news is that Firefox 4.0 will not work on a PPC. So I'm out of luck with Firefox and, I assume, newer versions of Camino, if and when they become available. The good news (sorta) is that I can print with Safari 4.1.3.

For shame Mozilla people!

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For older Macs that aren't supported in the Firefox 4.0 versions from Mozilla, try TenFourFox for PowerPC's running Mac 10.4.11 & 10.5.8 .
http://www.floodgap.com/software/tenfourfox/

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Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! I just downloaded and installed TenFourFox G4/7450 build 4.0 beta 11. It works much better than Firefox. It's blazingly fast and, while it is in beta, seems very stable. And, yes, it will print the was it's supposed to. The only weakness I've seen so far is that it does not support the PlugIn "trackmenot". I'm willing to live with that. So, thanks again for telling me about the unknown TenFourFox. I will post this advice on IOMug and MacWizards.

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You're welcome.

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So is there any way to get it to print properly if I don't set it to 'fit the page'?

I need to print a lot of pages on a daily basis, and I lose half those pages. It is really really inconvinient to switch back to IE to do this and then continue processing the same pages in Firefox (IE is way too slow).

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Hello edmeister - it's me again! After receiving your answer and looking forward to FF4 to solve this problem - it doesn't! Here's a page again http://www.dailywealth.com/ and when you do a print preview on it it only shows 1 page improperly formatted! Here's hoping someone out there will fix this once for all so the fools who set up there pages will not be able to fool FF!

Modified by pdani

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Sorry if my earlier comments mislead you to believe that the one or two print related Bugs that were fixed for 4.0 would cure all printing problems with Firefox. Different web page, different problems with Firefox printing.

The Bug that affected the page that you originally posted about was fixed for Firefox 4.0, but the DailyWealth page has problems with printing that I think is related to the JavaScript for addthis.com. If I allow NoScript to load JavaScript for addthis.com, I see only the first of what should be 3 pages in Print Preview, when that domain is blocked by NoScript I see all three. That is the same in both 3.6.17 and 4.0.1.

Bottom line is that Firefox just can't be relied upon to print everything that other browsers can. Mozilla really needs to come up with all new, modern code for printing web pages.

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Thanks again Edmeister - I can only hope that you are helping to light some fire under the appropriate people regarding all these printing issues - it's quite a shame that something so trivial is not properly handled by an otherwise great browser (although lately I am a little sour on it, and actually went back from 4.0 to 3.67! FF4 is not ready for prime time, in my opinion - too many problems, and I am not getting any answers to my questions and remarks, so I think I'll wait a while longer. The main reason I switched to it is that it has been advertised as "blindingly fast" but it isn't! Take care, Dani

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I am using Firefox 4 running on Windows 7 (64 bit) and I can confirm I have the same or very similar problem.

When I select shrink to fit where the page length is quite long, I get some weird output where the one page is split over three and the background image used for the logo is also displayed on all three pages!

Reducing the size of the page by 1% seems to be a good workaround but no doubt there will be others out there who will struggle with this.

The same page prints perfectly in ie8.

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This didn't help me.

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so...months go by...and nobody seems interested in fixing these annoying printing problems...wonder what can be done to light some fire under the people that are responsible for new development - they probably are just ignoring us! perhaps I'll start a new post with the same problem - who knows what they are looking at?