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Edge displays “123456” in PDF but prints “114447”

developer.microsoft.com

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Re: Edge displays “123456” in PDF but prints “114447”

#11

Post by cesarb »

danso wrote: post #6

Just in case you don't click through, the bug submitter refers to a color PDF (not a scan, so image compression artifacts are not an issue) that is similar in appearance to a periodic table. That is, it is not the sequence of `123456` that is mistranslated into `114447`, but a sequence of 6 table cells, each containing a single digit. It's not just the numbers that are misprinted, but the text inside those cells too,…

To make things even more interesting, the "original" PDF seems to have been generated by Ghostscript 8.15 and PScript5.dll 5.2, that is, it was also "printed to PDF" (from Microsoft Word, I presume).

Re: Edge displays “123456” in PDF but prints “114447”

#13

Post by stephanheijl »

danso wrote: post #6

Just in case you don't click through, the bug submitter refers to a color PDF (not a scan, so image compression artifacts are not an issue) that is similar in appearance to a periodic table. That is, it is not the sequence of `123456` that is mistranslated into `114447`, but a sequence of 6 table cells, each containing a single digit. It's not just the numbers that are misprinted, but the text inside those cells too,…

I have also encountered something similar whilst attempting to print a ticket to a major amusement park in Europe using Edge. The page the tickets were on secured by a login mechanism, and attempting to print the tickets resulted a page with an error. I had to save the PDF to the computer and print from there to get the proper output. It definitely seems like Edge re-renders or even re-requests the PDF before printing.

Re: Edge displays “123456” in PDF but prints “114447”

#15

Post by jdmichal »

saurik wrote: post #8
danso wrote: post #6

Just in case you don't click through, the bug submitter refers to a color PDF (not a scan, so image compression artifacts are not an issue) that is similar in appearance to a periodic table. That is, it is not the sequence of `123456` that is mistranslated into `114447`, but a sequence of 6 table cells, each containing a single digit. It's not just the numbers that are misprinted, but the text inside those cells too,…

As someone who works in PDFs constantly (due to work in local government), I would say the point of a PDF is to be able to reproduce the result given a file, not to assume the file cannot be changed... you can easily edit and save PDF files using Acrobat, for example. It is common that when you "print to PDF" you take the output of the printer and serialize that to PDF. I use this feature often on my Mac (which I thi…

Absolutely right. PDF fixes the problem Word documents have where different versions of Word tends to render the document ever so differently. Usually in a way that seems to mess up all those beautiful page breaks you meticulously planned. It does this by every element having absolute positioning.

Re: Edge displays “123456” in PDF but prints “114447”

#16

Post by jahewson »

danso wrote: post #6

Just in case you don't click through, the bug submitter refers to a color PDF (not a scan, so image compression artifacts are not an issue) that is similar in appearance to a periodic table. That is, it is not the sequence of `123456` that is mistranslated into `114447`, but a sequence of 6 table cells, each containing a single digit. It's not just the numbers that are misprinted, but the text inside those cells too,…

> which suggests that Edge's PDF engine is re-rendering the original PDF, rather than printing the original PDF as is

That's to be expected. The bitmap which Edge has rendered to the screen is not what will be sent to the printer driver. Instead, rich vector graphics will be sent. On Windows, the native print format is XPS, so this is most likely a bug in how Edge converts PDF to XPS for printing.

For simpler use cases Windows' graphics APIs can be used to both render to bitmap and to XPS but when printing something as rich and sophisticated as PDF better results are achieved by directly targeting the native print format, such as PCL, PostScript, or XPS. I suspect that's what the Edge devs have done and why it's producing different results on screen and in print.

Re: Edge displays “123456” in PDF but prints “114447”

#17

Post by derefr »

saurik wrote: post #8
danso wrote: post #6

Just in case you don't click through, the bug submitter refers to a color PDF (not a scan, so image compression artifacts are not an issue) that is similar in appearance to a periodic table. That is, it is not the sequence of `123456` that is mistranslated into `114447`, but a sequence of 6 table cells, each containing a single digit. It's not just the numbers that are misprinted, but the text inside those cells too,…

As someone who works in PDFs constantly (due to work in local government), I would say the point of a PDF is to be able to reproduce the result given a file, not to assume the file cannot be changed... you can easily edit and save PDF files using Acrobat, for example. It is common that when you "print to PDF" you take the output of the printer and serialize that to PDF. I use this feature often on my Mac (which I thi…

> I use this feature often on my Mac (which I think many would claim has excellent support for dealing with PDF files) to build a PDF that is stripped of any interactive forms: so as to get an output which is only the PDF "as printed".

Interesting; sort of like taking an old Fireworks .fw.png file, and then exporting it to PNG, to get rid of the Fireworks project data. Never thought of using "Print to PDF" this way!

Re: Edge displays “123456” in PDF but prints “114447”

#18

Post by bdowling »

saurik wrote: post #8
danso wrote: post #6

Just in case you don't click through, the bug submitter refers to a color PDF (not a scan, so image compression artifacts are not an issue) that is similar in appearance to a periodic table. That is, it is not the sequence of `123456` that is mistranslated into `114447`, but a sequence of 6 table cells, each containing a single digit. It's not just the numbers that are misprinted, but the text inside those cells too,…

As someone who works in PDFs constantly (due to work in local government), I would say the point of a PDF is to be able to reproduce the result given a file, not to assume the file cannot be changed... you can easily edit and save PDF files using Acrobat, for example. It is common that when you "print to PDF" you take the output of the printer and serialize that to PDF. I use this feature often on my Mac (which I thi…

The built-in MacOS support for PDF is great. Any app that can print to a printer can print to a PDF file. And the Preview app, despite its name, can edit PDFs to add annotations (text, graphics), add or remove pages, etc. There's also a feature by which you sign your name on a piece of paper, hold it up to the camera, and it will capture it and insert it into a the document. It's convenient that these are built in and don't require paying for something bloated like Acrobat Pro.

Re: Edge displays “123456” in PDF but prints “114447”

#19

Post by MichaelGG »

jdmichal wrote: post #15
saurik wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who works in PDFs constantly (due to work in local government), I would say the point of a PDF is to be able to reproduce the result given a file, not to assume the file cannot be changed... you can easily edit and save PDF files using Acrobat, for example. It is common that when you "print to PDF" you take the output of the printer and serialize that to PDF. I use this feature often on my Mac (which I thi…

Absolutely right. PDF fixes the problem Word documents have where different versions of Word tends to render the document ever so differently. Usually in a way that seems to mess up all those beautiful page breaks you meticulously planned. It does this by every element having absolute positioning.

And is the scourge of every paper I want to read on my Kindle. Everyone publishes their PDFs and there seems to be no reliable way to reflow them.

Re: Edge displays “123456” in PDF but prints “114447”

#20

Post by givinguflac »

danso wrote: post #6

Just in case you don't click through, the bug submitter refers to a color PDF (not a scan, so image compression artifacts are not an issue) that is similar in appearance to a periodic table. That is, it is not the sequence of `123456` that is mistranslated into `114447`, but a sequence of 6 table cells, each containing a single digit. It's not just the numbers that are misprinted, but the text inside those cells too,…

|Maybe this is an edge case?

Slow clap.

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