prints only landscape

[r3dplanet]

I have a client running Firefox 77 with clean settings. No extensions or anything. Whenever FF sends a print job it prints landscape. Both page setup, page preview, and printer preferences in the Control Panel and FF preferences are set to portrait mode. It prints landscape anyway. It doesn't matter if I CTRL-P a page or click the hamburger menu and change settings there or in print preview for either.

Here's what I've tried.

* Print settings are shrink to fit, 100% size, portrait.
* Removed all the print setting entries in the prefs.js file. No change.
* In advanced config I've tried toggling print orientation between 0 and 1. No change.
* Tried printing in landscape mode (which prints in portrait mode but only a part of the page). Going back to portrait mode prints landscape again.
* Tried changing the print.save setting to false. No change.
* Renamed the prefs.js file and re-started FF. No change.
* Went to Help - Troubleshooting - refresh FF. No change.

Searching around for a long time shows problems with this going back to 2001. None of options found there helped, and many weren't applicable to version 77. This is extremely tiresome because I have to travel to the client every time I have a fistful of new things to try but it's just shotgunning.

What is happening here? In the year 2020?

[BuddhaNature]

I don't know the answer to your problems concerning FF but would comment that perhaps you should have a look at the printer's own settings.

For example, I have a program on my own system, Treepad, that for years I couldn't get to print directly to my printer. Tinkering with this over the years, in essence tinkering with Treepad itself, I discovered that the printer seemed to expected the print to go to the 'manual paper tray' (the 'MP Tray') -- the MP tray would normally be only be used for printing envelopes or odd-sized-paper jobs. As there was never any paper in MP Tray (I never use that tray) the printout never got done, the printer put out an 'out of paper' alert. I would check the automatic tray (not the MP tray but the tray that would normally be used for printing out my print-jobs), see that it was well loaded with paper and just think that there was some problem with Treepad. If I really wanted to print from Treepad I had to I load the MP tray with paper -- which was a bit of a pain.

Spin forward in time to the recent past and one day I had occasion to look at the settings for my printer, this is from the printer's own 'Advanced Printing Preferences' which are accessed via Windows. While looking at those settings I noticed that for the 'Paper Source' the printer was set to 'Auto Selection' -- in other words the printer decided what tray to send any arriving print-job to. Once I saw that I had a brainwave and changed the setting to 'Cassette 1' -- the automatic feed paper tray, which would now be an enforced setting for the printer. Then after a quick test I found that Treepad could now print directly to the printer, no problems; the use of the automatic tray (Cassette 1) was now enforced at the printer level (itself). So it seemed that all the previous failures to print from Treepad were down to what the printer was doing on the 'Auto Selection' of the Paper Source.

I relate this story, not because it solves your problem, but because it might be worth your while having a look at how the printer itself is set-up in Advanced Printing Preferences. Maybe there is some setting in there that might cure the problem.

One thing I'm not clear on from your post is that in FF when you select Print Preview is the page displayed as being okay in Portrait? If it is it would suggest to me that the issue doesn't lie with FF.

P.S. You might find it helps to install a program called Fineprint (you can use it as a 'trial' for while) and see if you can print to that without issues. If you can then it would again suggest that the problem lies at the printer end and not with FF. Another possibility would be to try the print but using a different physical printer and see if the issue still occurs.

[r3dplanet]

Hello. Thank you for the reply.

Just a quick note to clarify. The landscape printing issue happens only in Firefox. Every other program including Office, Acrobat, GIMP, Chromium, Quickbooks, etc all print correctly. And yes, the print preview shows the page in portrait mode.