Firefox 3 garbles fixed-width font printout on Laserjet

Ever since I upgraded to FF3, I have been experiencing the problem that all fixed-width font text (e.g. code snippets on this page) would appear as garbage when printed on laserjet printer (HP Laserjet 8000 with PCL driver). Print preview looked fine though.

I have tried the following workarounds without any success:

  • Configure printer to “Send TrueType as Bitmaps” (a checkbox in printer custom settings)
  • Reset “print.print_printer” in FF3 About:config

Then I came across this mozilla support forum article and changed the Default Character Encoding from the default Western (ISO-8859-1) to Western (Windows-1252) in FF3 Tools/Options/Content/Fonts & Colors/Advanced.

Voila, problem solved.

2 thoughts on “Firefox 3 garbles fixed-width font printout on Laserjet”

  1. Pingback: Firefox 3.0.8 Prints Garbage Fixed-Width Text [Courier] › Tristan Waddington ~
  2. Pingback: Firefox 3.0.8 Prints Garbage Fixed-Width Text [Courier] | Tristan Waddington ~

Leave a comment