FF3 Truncating Print Web Page Job Title / Name

[eegee]

Very annoying behaviour introduced with FF3. Any web page print jobs being saved to file by print driver (most commonly, of the print-to-PDF type) using the job title/name, now have much shorter, incomplete, names (which are often duplicates of other chopped off names). Truncation usually occurs before the 30 character point, ending with 3 dots.

The box which pops up when printing remains the same as before tho' - displays full page title.

FF2 sending the full job name to the print driver is the preferred behaviour.

I don't believe this to be a PDF print driver specific problem. It can easily be duplicated by pausing any printer before printing, and then checking the Document Names in the printer queue.

Tried printing with the following:

• FF3.0 (with numerous addons) = truncated job name
• FF3.0 safe-mode = truncated job name
• FF2.0.0.15 (fresh install to own directory with new profile) = job name *not* truncated

See print messages & resulting print queue

Even tried:

• FF3.1a1pre (fresh install with new profile) = truncated job name

I'm very much hoping this hasn't anything to do with using W2K.

It seems I'll have to resort to using both FF 2 & 3 -- having to select a profile each time it starts -- until this gets resolved.

(Previously reported as being specifically a print to PDF problem http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=660814 with suggestion made that print drivers needed updating. http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=584147 might also be related.)

[the-edmeister]

1.Why the hell a 30+ character title? Wouldn't a shorter file name identify that file good enough? I would be willing the give odds that when a Bug report is found about that issue it turns out to be a limitation that only affects Firefox on the Windows platform.
2. Separate Firefox installations can be launched with their respective Profiles with commandline arguments included in the desktop shortcut Target line.

Code: Select all

~\firefox.exe -P default

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[eegee]

2. Thanks for the tip--works fine.

1. 30+ character titles are very common in web pages - often with the site name first, followed by page specific title (the useful part of the name).

I've done a bit more testing to see what sort of print job name truncating various apps actually do & if there was some sort of os limit:

• FF2 = page title to 64 chars (including ... at end)
• Acrobat Reader 8 = PDF name to 61 chars (with ... in middle & .pdf extension)
• Foxit Reader 2.3 = PDF path & name in full (over 130 chars so far)

The new FF3 30 character limit is too restrictive compared to the old 64 character limit in FF2.

As I do this type of printing to PDF frequently, now having to edit the filename for most jobs in FF3 becomes very tedious, if not impractical, real fast.

[walterz193]

Hi all,

I have the same problem with FF3. I often print several tabs as pdf files to archive some articles on news pages. Using FF2 there was no problem at all. Almost the whole title was used as filename.
In FF3 the name / title gets truncated and it's pretty annoying to have to type in filenames by hand for many tabs.

If anyone knows how to change the value of the length that is used as filename or any other solution to this problem, please let us know.

Thank you!

[kwkard]

Has this issue been addressed yet? This is the only thing holding us back from updating to FF3 and we really would like to make that change if for nothing else than security enhancements. However, we generate xml files and display them in firefox as our reporting system and often the preferred file name is longer than what FF3 allows. This was not an issue in FF2.

We also have automated this process using the extension cmdline print so we can print directly to the PDF printer. As you can guess this causes problems when the file names get truncated.

Any help is appreciated and keep up the good work Mozilla!

[Donald-w]

This is a problem for me too. It risks replacing files with the same name and makes printing to files tedious. Saving a page in Firefox often has the same problem in the Firefox rarely has a good name for a page. I imaging that is partly the website's coding, but other browsers seem to manage.

Any workarounds or fixes yet when printing to a PDF file? Thanks.

[kwkard]

Going back to FF2 was the only thing to alleviate this. This seems like such a trivial piece of code to change.....

[Tony B]

I'm running FF 3.5.2 under Windows XP and this is still a problem. Does anyone have a
fix or workaround yet?

As well, depending on the web page content, some of the page is just LOST in the print.
I'm forced to review the PDF print (using PDFCreator, though CutePDF has the same
problem, as do actual print files) to see if the output has been truncated. This is apparently
a known bug in FF for years, and has still not been successfully fixed. The bug descriptions
mention "positioned DIV's". Typically, a problem page has a frame with a lot of URLs in
the content, for example a job list. A print fills the first page. The next page has only the
bottom of page content, and all of the content from where the first page filled to the bottom
of the screen content is lost.

I've used FF for years, and printed thousands of web pages to preserve the content. This was a very unpleasant discovery for me. I'm forced to use Opera to print these problem pages, and
it hangs sometimes doing it. I refuse to use IE for it, though.

[LeonidAdams]

I'm running FF 3.5.2 under Windows XP and this is still a problem. Does anyone have a
fix or workaround yet?

join issue. Should not this as a dare.

[unpocoloco]

Bump? I've been frustrated by this issue for a loooong time now.

Want: PrimoPDF filename to be title of webpage.
Have: Filename like "mozillaZine - Your Source f...pdf"

Thanks

[jjensson]

Hi guys,

I just found this topic and registered to post here. For a long time i suffered from this issue, but i always thought it's a problem of PDFcreator. I even posted a question on their board, but nobody cared... http://de.pdfforge.org/forum/help/4307- ... ader-links

Today i finally discovered that the culprit is FF3.

So what now? Is this going to be fixed soon? Do the developers even take this complaint seriously? I'm saving many many websites as PDF every day and it's a STRUGGLE!

jj

[MCBastos]

I have opened a bug on Bugzilla regarding this issue:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=531606

[islestar]

Safari picks up the entire title.

[unpocoloco]

I guess this one is just too hard for FireFox to handle...

[the-edmeister]

Yes, it is too hard. The Mozilla developers seem to be incapable of fixing any printing bugs, there's at least one that goes back to the days Netscape still owned the code - before Mozilla was even created.




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