Xprint observations
Using sid, I installed mozilla-browser-snapshot and xprint.
1. Printing web pages is not 'wysiwig'; the default text (without
font tags in the HTML) which is printed is not the same as it
is on the screen. Mostly it is some kind of sans-serif font. R.
Chandrasekhar mentioned the same problem a few months ago; in
his case everything was printed in Courier.
2. Following R. Chandrasekhar, I downloaded Mozilla from
mozilla.org and installed it in /usr/local. That version does
print whatever text is on the screen completely 'wysiwig', by
constructing Postscript files with lots of bitmaps. Often the
bitmaps look awful when viewed in gv, but they look fine on
paper. However, Mozilla from mozilla.org does not display
anti-aliased fonts in the browser screen. R. Chandrasekhar
mentioned this also.
3. By some tweaking (setting "font.FreeType2.enable" to "true" in
/usr/local/mozilla/defaults/pref/unix.js), it is possible to
get anti-aliased fonts also in the mozilla.org version. The
anti-aliasing is much less beautiful than in Debian
mozilla-snapshot, but anti-aliased it is. In the mozilla.org
version, in preferences/appearance/fonts, the names of AA
fonts start with a capital letter, the non-AA versions with
a lowercase letter.
4. But if you select AA fonts for display in the mozilla.org
version, xprint no longer prints 'wysiwig'. Just like in the
Debian version.
So there seems to be some incompatibility between AA display and
'wysiwig' printing through xprint. This could be a fundamental
problem; if so, it would seriously limit the usefulness of xprint.
But I wonder if anyone has been able to set it up in such a way
as to have AA display and 'wysiwig' printing at the same time.
Regards, Jan
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