Bugzilla – Bug 58952
Mozilla should show a warning when glyphs for printing are missing
Last modified: 2009-10-13 05:15:21 UTC
When Mozilla is producing a printout and it cannot find a suitable font then it silently replaces glyph names with ".notdef" which results an empty box printed instead of the real glyph. In this case the result is really an error in the printout. Therefore Mozilla should show at least a warning message to the user to have her informed that some characters may not be printed. It would be nice if Mozilla could also show a hint which font or which kind of font is missing (e.g. "no traditional Chinese font"). As no such message is shown at the moment the user blames the printing system for the wrong printout but the printing system prints it exactly what Mozilla has made.
See the initial comment in the related problem report http://bugzilla.suse.de/show_bug.cgi?id=43903
is this still valid for current mozilla/firefox printing system?
Of course it is valid. Any application which produces PostScript with embedded fonts can have the problem that needed fonts are not installed (or are not found). In particular when Mozilla/Firefox wants to produce CJK PostScript the CJK fonts must have been installed by then user (they are not installed by default). I use mozilla-1.7.5-17 on a 9.2 default installation. For example go to http://www.ibm.com/cn/ or choose any "exotic" country from http://www.ibm.com/planetwide/select/selector.html and then print into a file and then view it with gs -r60 mozilla.ps and you see the missing glyphs. But there was no warning from Mozilla about the missing fonts. I.e. this warning is still missing.
Jungshik, would this be possible?
A typo in comment #3: I use 9.3 (not 9.2). In comment #1 the URL is no longer valid because our bug IDs have changed. Now it is: bug #58903.
still valid for 9.3
We're not fixing this for 9.3. If this bug still exists in openSUSE 10.2, please reopen and change the product.
Still present in openSUSE 10.2. Running MozillaFirefox-2.0-30 Visit this site http://www.ibm.com/tw/ (see bug #58903) and print it from Firefox results no warning from Firefox but all Chinese charactes are printed as empty boxes.
Equally valid on openSUSE 10.3 with MozillaFirefox-2.0.0.8-1.1 (same site as above). A few characters do show up, but only because they're embedded in images. At this point, the best we can realistically hope for is a fix in openSUSE 11.0. Changing product again and noting the original product in the OS field.
While that is a very valid enhancement request it's out of scope for openSUSE (and a feature anyway). Postscript in mozilla is nowadays created by cairo anyway (which doesn't make it better in that regard probably). Closing this as I don't think it makes sense to keep it here. Please reopen if necessary.