[Bug 332472]

[Ilja Sekler]

(In reply to comment #6)
> (In reply to comment #5)
>> On Ubuntu 10.10, Firefox with this patch [...] applied still
>> passes PS instead of PDF to CUPS, so probably either CUPS or
>> gtk2 on Ubuntu lies.
> 
> That's because the patch contains a gtk version check. gtk versions
> older than 2.24 lie about the PDF print capability so we fallback
> to PS in that case.

Sorry, I simply mixed up gtk2 and gnome versions :-(
Of course, the check for gtk_minor_version fails on Ubuntu 10.10.

>> Would it be better to offer a preference to override detection and
>> enforce PDF?
> 
> Probably not. There is no immediate benefit to using PDF.

I have to disagree. The benefit is major and immediate. Gecko PS output
has severe issues at the moment when dealing with transparency. The
visual impression of printing semi-transparent elements is the
following: they get rendered to the screen resolution first (text is
hinted to the screen resolution), then the bitmap is scaled up to 300dpi
resolution and so dumped into PS. This looks very bad. But even usual
300dpi image fallbacks are perceptibly blurry when printed on a 600dpi
inkjet printer.

The similar issue in respect to PDF output
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=624152> has a patch
waiting for checkin, with this patch as well as prior to the regression
passing Gecko PDF output directly to CUPS worked and works perfectly.

This is why it would be so nice to have a user_pref to allow testers and
ordinary users to easily workaround Gecko, Cairo, Ghostscript, gtk2 and
CUPS limitations and bugs without a need to build their own hacked
versions.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/332472

Title:
  Thunderbird cannot print to PDF