Native Printing Support in Firefox and Seamonkey

Native printing support is now available in new betas of Firefox and Seamonkey. These betas are part of a project sponsored by Mensys to provide full printing support in the Mozilla apps.

• Firefox v4.0b8pre is available from: ftp.netlabs.org or e-vertise.com
• Seamonkey v2.1b2pre is available from: ftp.netlabs.org or e-vertise.com

Printing Features

Native Support - all native printer drivers should work if their output resolution is set to 360 DPI or less. If the resolution is set higher, the app will attempt to reduce it to 300 or 360 DPI. Should that fail, it will popup a 'Print to file' dialog and will create a PDF. See the 'Notes' section below additional info.

Postscript Support - Mozilla's built-in Postscript support can still be used if needed. CUPS users may need to enable it if they are unable to change their native driver's DPI setting. See 'Notes' below for details.

PDF Support - PDFs can be created by selecting 'Print to file', When the file dialog appears, give the file's name a ".pdf" extension.

Other Features

Image Handling - an experimental feature in this beta eliminates native handling of images (i.e. pictures, graphics, etc.). This _may_ reduce the instability many users report after the browser has been open for several days.

Notes

• Resolution has been limited to avoid excessive memory consumption. At 300 DPI, a print job on A4- or Letter-sized paper uses about 32mb; at 600 DPI, it requires 128mb. The 'Print to file' dialog appears whenever a job needs more than 64mb.
• Memory use is controlled by the paper size and DPI settings, not the number of pages. If you use a small enough page size (e.g. a CD-cover or photograph sheet), you may be able to print at a higher resolution.
• To enable Mozilla's built-in Postscript support:
  • enter "about:config" in the browser's address bar, press Enter
  • click MB2 on any item in the preferences listing
  • select 'New->Boolean' from the popup menu
  • enter "print.os2.postscript.use_builtin" (no quotes), press OK
  • select "true", press OK
  To use the built-in support, you must select a printer associated with a native PS driver. The driver won't actually be used - it simply acts as a flag to tell Mozilla to produce PS output.
• CUPS users may find that the only resolution available is 1440 DPI. To confirm this, open the printer's 'Job Properties' notebook to the 'Output' tab and look at 'Resolution'. If '1440' is the only value listed, the PPD for this printer has no "*Resolution" entries. You have two options:
  • enable Mozilla's built-in Postscript support
  • edit the PPD to add the entries, then import the PPD into the driver (if you need instructions, please post a request in the newsgroups)
• In the current beta, initial memory use will appear to increase due to the change in image-handling. Memory freed as images are discarded will be reused by the browser but won't be released for system-wide use. This will be fixed in the next version.
• A copy of this announcement is included in the zips as PRINTING.txt.