Firefox:Printing and Page Setup
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| | +------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Page Setup +------------------------+-------------------------+ | | | Paper & Format Options | Margins & Header/Footer | | | +-----------------------+ +-------------------------+ | | | +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ | | | | | Paper Options | | | | | | |----------------------------------------------------------------------| | | | | | | | | | | | +--+ +-----+ | | | | | | Orientation (x) Portrait | | (o) Landscape | | | | | | | | | | +-----+ | | | | | | +--+ | | | | | | | | | | | | Scale [ 100 % ] (x) Shrink To Fit Page Width | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Paper Size (v)[ Letter, Legal, A4... ] | | | | | | | | | | | | Paper Source (v)[ Sheet, Borderless, Tray#... ] | | | | | | | | | | | | (x) Duplex ( Long Edge ) (o) Duplex ( Short Edge ) | | | | | | | | | | | | (x) Page Order: Print Last Page First | | | | | | | | | | | |----------------------------------------------------------------------| | | | | | Format Options & Color | | | | | |----------------------------------------------------------------------| | | | | | | | | | | | (x) Print All Text Black (o) Print Beveled Lines | | | | | | | | | | | | (o) Print Black Lines (o) Print Backgrounds ( Colors & Images ) | | | | | | | | | | | +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ | | | | ( OK ) ( Set Defaults ) ( Cancel ) | | | +--------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | +------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
Contents
- 1 Comment by Doug
- 2 Comment by Art Wildman
- 3 Printing UI
- 4 Comment by Thomas Lendo
- 5 Comment by Mike Schinkel
- 6 Comment by Robert Hofer
- 7 Comment by Vassilii Khachaturov
- 8 Comment by User_talk:intersol
- 9 Comment by Nathan M. Andelin
- 10 Comment by User_talk:aceqbaceq
- 11 Comment by User gpc
- 12 Comment by User jim
Comment by Doug
Firefox needs to have an editable print preview. I believe that pre-print modification is a high-demand feature. Have you not copied a web page into word to remove some annoying elements of a page without a printable version option? Just some primitive editing functionality must be added.
Comment by Art Wildman
I use the 'Nuke Anything' extension to modify preprint pages in Firefox. It's not perfect but it helps remove unwanted ink/paper wasting objects... greasemonkey, addblock and a few others can help customize and pre-format pages too. BTW, I wrote the original Printing and Page Setup UI scratchpad and contributed these references in an older wiki to document a 4 year old bug & missing features in Mozilla/Firefox/Thunderbird. It is rather complicated due to the cross platform nature of Mozilla and how each OS handles Printing differently. If only someone like HP would design an open standard Printer Driver Spec/Page Setup UI for multiple OSes... life would be simpler & better for our users and opensource friends. LinuxPrinting.org
References:
Page Setup form in Netscape 4.78 (all 4.x)
Bugzilla# 153363 Prtinting in sharp B&W
Bugzilla# 62422 Printing should allow control over the header and footer, orientation, printer selection, which pages to print
Bugzilla# 118563 The new print properties dialog does not save papersize
Printing UI
Thoughts About a Print UI for Mozilla
Bugzilla# 125824 make print settings better (tracking bug)
Bugzilla# 181527 Printing always prints full header
Programmers File Editor Print-UI
Programmers File Editor Print-UI gifs
Comment by Thomas Lendo
For better customization it should be possible to change the header and footer margin space, to order the header and footer text like you want (e.g. "title - URL" at the center of the page, not "title" on the left side and "URL" centered) and to set a maximum length of the URL shown in the header/footer. An URL, which is too long for a single line, should wrap to a new line up to the maximum given length. The content size of the page shrinks with every new header/footer line. Default should be an automatical max. length with single line and no wrap.
Especially Thunderbird needs more options: possibility to show more data on the top of the printout (e.g. account name), adaptability (font, font size, bold, underlined) of the data on the top of the printout (account name, sender, subject heading, …), more appealing integration of attachements (neat pictures instead of the cold facts of content type and content encoding) and choice of insertion of attachments - before content or after it.
Comment by Mike Schinkel
1.) ALLOW ME TO PUT A PRINT PREVIEW BUTTON ON THE TOOLBAR!!!
2.) I concur with the need for an editable print preview. Could be limited to select&delete plus insert page break, or could be a lot more.
3.) I would like to see printing fixed as FireFox won't print all the content on some web pages (I haven't figured out why but here is an example: http://blogs.pathf.com/agileajax/2006/06/steps_to_ajax_m.html)
4.) Support two-up and four-up printing and two-sided output to duplex printers (although FinePrint works for me in the mean time)
5.) Allow suppression of HTML headers and footers on page 2 and beyond to allow for condensing of output.
Comment by Robert Hofer
1.) Firefox does not print correctly tags with style="position:absolute;" on multiple pages: try this Testprint muliple Page then choose printpreview; to see how it should be, try it in IE (sorry..) or Opera
2.) Printing out of a frame direct to the printer, just the active frame is printed, which is ok. The Printpreview shows allways the whole frameset, which is rather useless. Printpreview should behave like printing!
3.) Add some special elements for control of the printer: i.e. <printer="name:hp deskjet; tray:1; copies:3;" > (im am using firefox as the main userinterface for applications in intranet)
Comment by Vassilii Khachaturov
Why does the Postscript/default printer paper size dialog only lists a handful of sizes, when about:config shows much more paper sizes known to mozilla? How does one add a custom size? How does one add new sizes? (I'm talking about a setup when a machine is printerless, and the only usage of the printing UI is through the "print to file" option?
Comment by User_talk:intersol
I would like to see a way of overwriting header/footer settings from CSS/HTML - for example for generating printable invoices (no footer/header).
Comment by Nathan M. Andelin
I second this. Or, provide a way via JavaScript to programatically set defaults in the Page Setup dialog.
Comment by User_talk:aceqbaceq
i succesfully solved problem of header/footer for myself. i have printer named 3120. go about:config enter keyword "edge" then i change this values so :
print.printer_CUPS/3120.print_edge_bottom=60
print.printer_CUPS/3120.print_edge_left=40
print.printer_CUPS/3120.print_edge_right=40
print.printer_CUPS/3120.print_edge_top=40
by the way sucha variables as
print.print_edge_bottom print.print_edge_left print.print_edge_right print.print_edge_top
DOES NOTHING.
then i go to file-page options-margins & header/footer-
i setup margins : top=0.8 inch bottom=0.8 inch left=0.5 inch right=0.5 inch
and my paper size is set as "letter (8,5x11 inch)", though i print on A4. but unfortunately firefox do not print properly on paper A4 when it is on A4. that is paradox for me.
that is all. :)
and i don not understand. why so long ( now we have firefox 2.0.0.13) firefox have such basic stupid mistake.
by the way if firefox have top=0.9 or top=0.7 then it printed page only about 25% of its content.
and that is not all.
if top position of page intersect position of header, then top part of page destroy header. and in this case header did not print.
Comment by User gpc
On Mac OS X, Firefox 3.0 has no print preview function of its own. There is only a useless preview function native to OS X that, so far as I can tell, is completely equivalent to printing to pdf and then opening the pdf in Acrobat, which takes far too much time. Most of the time I'm printing to pdf in any case and I want a quick preview so I won't have to go through that time consuming process multiple times to get one pdf produced correctly!
Safari has a great preview that automatically appears on the left of the panel of printing options. You can modify the scale, orientation, paper size, which pages to print, whether to print backgrounds, whether to print headers & footers -- all there with the preview instantly updating. You can step through page 1, 2, etc, in the preview.
The time I waste trying to print things in Firefox -- or flipping over to Safari just to print some pages -- has just about driven me to give up on using Firefox altogether.
Comment by User jim
I just use Firebug to add the 'display:none;' CSS style to any element I don't want printed (ex, the right/left menu columns when I only want the body). This is fairly easy once done a few times. Some day it would be nice if the paid geniuses would fix their page generators to add properly designed print.css files but until then, folks, we're pretty much on our own. BTW, gpc, I found Safari 4 tying up CPU resources so I switched to Opera 10. Seems to work as well without all the CPU excitement. For reference: Win XP MCE SP3 & FF 3.5.9
