[CentOS] Printing problems with Firefox

Thu Oct 1 17:08:19 UTC 2009
Robert Heller <heller at deepsoft.com>

I have been having problems printing web pages with Firefox under CentOS
4.8:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.14) Gecko/2009091009
CentOS/3.0.14-1.el4.centos Firefox/3.0.14

What happens is that some of the text is 'scrambled' (looks like
somehow something is messed up with the font encoding of whatever font
is being used).  Sometimes the postscript (or PDF) code being generated
is broken (the ghostscript print filter crashes because the postscript
is broken or incomplete.  For one page I get the console message "could
not load glyph 321".  When I print to a file and select 'PDF' format, I
get sometimes PDF files that ghostview (gv-3.6.2-2.el4)/ghostscript
(ghostscript-7.07-33.11.el4) find errors with.  Xpdf (xpdf-3.00-20.el4)
also does not like these PDF files (lots of errors of various sorts). 
Even Adobe's acroread does not like them sometimes.  Sometimes, with
enough fussing with I can get the PDF files to print.  Sometimes I end
up taking a screen shot with gimp of the Adobe acroread window and print
that. :-(

I have done two things:

1) Created a fresh profile and re-populated with my bookmarks,
passwords, and addons.  No difference.

2) Created a fresh profile and did not re-populate with with anything
(basically a 'vanila' profile).  I still have problems.

It appears that there is some system setting or some package I have
loaded (I have a bunch of packages from rpmforge and epel installed). I
also have some extra fonts installed.  I am not sure what the problem
is.  I have Seamonkey installed and Seamonkey *seems* to print at least
some pages properly (not extensively tested).

I like firefox and have it all setup the way I like.  Everything
*except* printing works just fine.  Firefox *used* to print just fine. 
I *think* the problem with printing started with Firefox 3.0.<mumble>,
but I am not sure exactly.

Oh, I *don't* run either the Gnome or KDE desktop environment -- I use a
plain window manager only (FVWM in MWM mode).

-- 
Robert Heller             -- 978-544-6933
Deepwoods Software        -- Download the Model Railroad System
http://www.deepsoft.com/  -- Binaries for Linux and MS-Windows
heller at deepsoft.com       -- http://www.deepsoft.com/ModelRailroadSystem/