Join the Mozilla’s Test Days event from Dec 2–8 to test the new Firefox address bar on Firefox Beta 134 and get a chance to win Mozilla swag vouchers! 🎁

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

Lolu chungechunge lwabekwa kunqolobane. Uyacelwa ubuze umbuzo omusha uma udinga usizo.

Can't fix printing even with about:config, print_printing, reset.

more options

I have looked through pages of help and have tried all that I can figure to try and have unistalled and installed and cannot get the printer to print full pages. The same printer and the same documents work fine with other browsers. I have a number of computers and they all have Firefox and they all work fine with the same printer and the same documents. Just this one computer has the problem. Documents print with only the middle 2-3/8 inches printing down the page and the rest is discarded.

I have looked through pages of help and have tried all that I can figure to try and have unistalled and installed and cannot get the printer to print full pages. The same printer and the same documents work fine with other browsers. I have a number of computers and they all have Firefox and they all work fine with the same printer and the same documents. Just this one computer has the problem. Documents print with only the middle 2-3/8 inches printing down the page and the rest is discarded.

All Replies (6)

more options

Hi norbertfarquharsh, does this problem appear in the Print Preview screen as well as on paper? (It's faster to troubleshoot and fewer trees killed if so...)

In Print Preview -- you can call that up using either:

  • "3-bar" menu button > Print
  • (menu bar) File > Print Preview

-- what is your scaling set to? If Shrink to Fit uses the same area of paper but just makes the print tiny, then it sounds like a margin or paper size problem.

In your efforts so far, did you do the settings reset in about:config? This thread has the steps:

https://support.mozilla.org/questions/1235977

more options

Thank you very much for your comments and especially for the link. I had tried what you mention and it had not helped but the link mentions problems with Brother printers which is what I have. I did what was suggested there (reset all line in about:config print that have Brother in the line) and it helped but there are still problems. It is moving the printed material to the right and folding lines that are not folded in the preview and also cutting information in the lower left and off the bottom. In every case the preview looks fine but it does not print what the preview shows.

   I took some screen shots of the preview page showing it is okay and tried to scan a printed page to  post it to the reply but had trouble with the scanner and ran out of time and will not be here to do antyhing tomorrow.
more options

Hmm, it sounds like the problem has been reversed: instead of thinking your printer has tiny paper, it now thinks your printer has huge paper. What value do you have in about:config for

printer_your-printer-name.print_paper_data

more options

Thank you for your response.

  I looked in about:config for printer and a lot of entries came up with the printer name (Brother). I noticed that they were in dark print and then remembered that i had worked on setting up scanning and maybe that changed them as they were all in light print after I did the reset on each Brother printer line.
  As an aside comment, it was also obvious that a huge number of lines with "Brother" in them were missing from my previous visit. There had been many duplicates. I wondered if that had occurred when I changed the printer installation from wired LAN to wireless to support printing from a cell phone.
    I looked for a line ending in print_paper_data and found  (modified, integer, -1) in the three columns.
   I did not reset the lines this time.
   I was also successful in scanning a printed page. I named the file "printout" and also include screenprints of the preview page. Two screen prints to get the top and bottom of the page.
 Thanks again for your help.

Joe

more options

Hi Joe, the paper data value is usually more like 1 for "Letter" size. I'm not sure what -1 means, but whatever your particular printer likes is what it needs to be.

more options

Thank you for your response. I looked a couple of the other computers. That value was -1 on one, 256 on another. So I do not know what it should be.

   Yesterday, I again checked that I could print a document with another browser. No problem. 
    So I completely uninstalled the printer on this computer

which had the problem that originally complained of. I also uninstalled all the software that came with the printer install. I cleared everything out of device manager. I reset everything in Firefox related to Brother. I thought about making certain there was no information about Brother in the windows registry, but passed on that. I shut the computer down. I powered it up again and installed again. I just printed out this page. A preview showed up okay and the pages printed okay.

   Apparently the problem is no more but I do not know where it came from or what to do if it comes back and doing what I did yesterday took a lot of time so I hope it does not come back..