Problems printing web pages

From MozillaZine Knowledge Base

If you have problems printing web pages in Firefox (or another Mozilla browser) try these solutions [1]:

1 Reset printer
2 Does not print to paper at all
3 Prints to a small portion of the page
4 Delayed printing or freezes when trying to print
5 Does not print entire page content
6 Does not print multiple pages
7 External links

Reset printer

As a first step, reset the selected printer in your Firefox preferences:

Type about:config in the Location Bar and press Enter. A list of preferences will appear.
Find the preference print.print_printer (Note: this preference is missing in Firefox profiles where you've never used the printer.)
Right-click (context-click) that preference and select "Reset"
Restart Firefox.

If you get the warning dialog, "Printing failed when starting the document" and if the print.print_printer preference has no printer shown, either you don't have a printer selected, or Firefox doesn't know it is installed on your system.

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Does not print to paper at all

If you are having a problem with Firefox not printing to paper at all, and you don't receive a warning dialog:

Press {Ctrl + P} on the keyboard and make sure that you don't have Print to file selected under Printer > Comment:
Make sure that your correct printer is selected at Printer > Name:. (You might be "printing" to a Program such as Adobe PDF or Intuit.)

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Prints to a small portion of the page

If you are having a problem with Firefox printing only on a small portion of the page:

Press {Ctrl + P} on the keyboard and verify the correct Printer is selected,
Click the Properties button and look at the Paper tab and Layout tab (or whatever your particular printer brand calls those items):
- Paper: Is the correct size selected? (usually 8.5"x11" or A4). Is the Orientation correct? Is the Printable Area correct?
- Layout: -Is Reduce/Enlarge check-marked? It shouldn't be. Is Multi-Page check-marked? It shouldn't be unless that is what you want

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Delayed printing or freezes when trying to print

Check your printer Properties -> Advanced section to make sure that print spooling is turned on.

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Does not print entire page content

If images are cut off, click "File -> Print Preview" and, on the toolbar, set "Scale:" to "Shrink to fit", if a different setting is shown. [2]

If part of the text is cut off, try setting "Scale:" to 100% in Print Preview. If that doesn't help, try selecting the Monospace font to something other than "Courier" or "Courier New" in your Firefox options ("Content / Fonts & Colors -> Advanced") and UNcheck the option to allow pages to use their own fonts. This may be necessary on certain web pages that specify Courier fonts since those fonts may cause printing problems in Firefox [3]

When trying to print web pages with text areas, if the text area contains a misspelled word and spell checking is enabled, all the following content of the text area will not be printed. You can right-click in the text area and uncheck "Spell check this field" to turn off spell checking temporarily while you print. [4]

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