Very bad quality from evince printing pages which have been printed to pdf using firefox

Bug #394266 reported by Vincenzo Ciancia
22
This bug affects 3 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Poppler
Confirmed
Medium
firefox (Ubuntu)
Fix Released
Low
Ubuntu Desktop Bugs

Bug Description

Using karmic and firefox-3.0, I printed a pdf of the following web page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subgroup

(permanent link: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Subgroup&oldid=296077109)

If I print this pdf with evince (even printing to a pdf file) I get terrible quality and pages are converted to images. If I print it with okular, I get a good quality document, however a mathematical formula is obscured (bottom of page 3). In evince the formula is visible.

Here is the pdf printed from firefox:

http://launchpadlibrarian.net/28547865/groups.pdf

The reprint from evince:

http://launchpadlibrarian.net/28547874/a.pdf

The reprint from Okular:

http://launchpadlibrarian.net/28547885/b.pdf

On this other bug report: https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cupsys/+bug/150187 Adrian Johnson explained:

The reason pages 1 and 4 of your PDF are printed as a bitmap are:

- Firefox is using cairo operators that are not natively supported by PDF on page 1 and 4. I don't think there is any reason that Firefox needs to use anything other than CAIRO_OPERATOR_OVER when printing so I consider this a bug in Firefox.

- As a result cairo embeds a fallback image in the PDF for the region drawn with operators not supported by PDF. But the bounding box of the PDF pattern used to draw the fallback image is set to the page size instead of the image size. This is a bug in cairo.

- When poppler is used to print the PDF via the cairo backend the image becomes a full page image due to the pattern bounding box being set to the page size.

Revision history for this message
In , Pedro Villavicencio (pedro) wrote :

this report has been filed here:

https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/poppler/+bug/394266

"
Using karmic and firefox-3.0, I printed a pdf of the following web page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subgroup

(permanent link: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Subgroup&oldid=296077109)

If I print this pdf with evince (even printing to a pdf file) I get terrible quality and pages are converted to images. If I print it with okular, I get a good quality document, however a mathematical formula is obscured (bottom of page 3). In evince the formula is visible.

Here is the pdf printed from firefox:

http://launchpadlibrarian.net/28547865/groups.pdf

The reprint from evince:

http://launchpadlibrarian.net/28547874/a.pdf

The reprint from Okular:

http://launchpadlibrarian.net/28547885/b.pdf

On this other bug report: https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cupsys/+bug/150187 Adrian Johnson explained:

The reason pages 1 and 4 of your PDF are printed as a bitmap are:

- Firefox is using cairo operators that are not natively supported by PDF on page 1 and 4. I don't think there is any reason that Firefox needs to use anything other than CAIRO_OPERATOR_OVER when printing so I consider this a bug in Firefox.

- As a result cairo embeds a fallback image in the PDF for the region drawn with operators not supported by PDF. But the bounding box of the PDF pattern used to draw the fallback image is set to the page size instead of the image size. This is a bug in cairo.

- When poppler is used to print the PDF via the cairo backend the image becomes a full page image due to the pattern bounding box being set to the page size."

It's also reproducible with git master version of poppler.

Thanks,

Revision history for this message
Pedro Villavicencio (pedro) wrote :

Thanks for the report, confirming, I've managed to reproduce the same with the version shipped on karmic and the git master version of poppler too. I've sent this report upstream at: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=22855

Changed in poppler (Ubuntu):
assignee: nobody → Ubuntu Desktop Bugs (desktop-bugs)
importance: Undecided → Low
status: New → Triaged
Changed in poppler:
status: Unknown → Confirmed
Revision history for this message
In , Carlos Garcia Campos (carlosgc) wrote :

> The reason pages 1 and 4 of your PDF are printed as a bitmap are:
>
> - Firefox is using cairo operators that are not natively supported by PDF on
> page 1 and 4. I don't think there is any reason that Firefox needs to use
> anything other than CAIRO_OPERATOR_OVER when printing so I consider this a bug
> in Firefox.
>
> - As a result cairo embeds a fallback image in the PDF for the region drawn
> with operators not supported by PDF. But the bounding box of the PDF pattern
> used to draw the fallback image is set to the page size instead of the image
> size. This is a bug in cairo.
>
> - When poppler is used to print the PDF via the cairo backend the image becomes
> a full page image due to the pattern bounding box being set to the page size."
>
> It's also reproducible with git master version of poppler.

So, if I understood correctly, it's a bug in firefox and cairo, not in poppler, since we are using the wrong bounding box becuase of the cairo bug.

Revision history for this message
madbiologist (me-again) wrote :

I can't reproduce this on Ubuntu 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat" alpha 3 updated to firefox 3.6.9+build1+nobinonly-0ubuntu1 and libcairo2 1.9.14-1ubuntu1. All pages printed to PDF by Firefox seem to be text, not bitmaps.

affects: poppler (Ubuntu) → firefox (Ubuntu)
Changed in firefox (Ubuntu):
status: Triaged → Fix Released
Changed in poppler:
importance: Unknown → Medium
Revision history for this message
madbiologist (me-again) wrote :

The Firefox part of this should be fixed in Firefox 3.6.11 - see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=435313

Changed in poppler:
importance: Medium → Unknown
Revision history for this message
Benjamin Redelings (benjamin-redelings) wrote :

I can confirm that the evince part is still an issue on current natty.
 - If I load the pdf printed from firefox into evince, it looks fine.
 - If I do print preview, pages 1 and 4 are still entirely bitmap images,
   whereas pages 2 and 3 are nice and sharp.

My cairo version is 1.10.2-1ubuntu1.

Changed in poppler:
importance: Unknown → Medium
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