Mac Firefox Not Printing – Fixed!

I got a new printer the other day, which works fine but for some reason I can’t print from Firefox. With any page I hit command-P, the Print dialog comes up but nothing got to the printer. Pressing ‘Preview’ instead of print meant a progress dialog appeared but no preview turned up. Great. The temporary solution was to cut and paste the link into Safari which printed just fine.

Well after a bit of digging I’ve found the solution. Following some hints from the Firefox forums I closed down Firefox and restarted it from the terminal in safe mode, you have to be in the Firefox.app folder:

./firefox -safe-mode

On running this Firefox starts up as usual. I then tried printing again, and on hitting ‘Preview’ the following error message appeared in the terminal window:

WARNING: Font “Times” with style 0 can’t be handled by the imaging system. This document can’t be drawn/printed with this font.

Ah hah! A clue. So based on this I found a handy hint at MacRumors, that simply suggests going into Firefox Preferences – Content and changing your default font, I choose Arial 16pt. As if by magic, hitting Print then Preview opened up a preview PDF. Hoorah, all solved. So now I can just open Firefox as usual (not in safe mode) and everything prints just fine. Phew.

UPDATE: 2007-12-02

Recently I’ve been finding this solution has not been working for all pages, and over-riding the fonts for pages is not the best solution. It now turns out the issue may have been to do with me disabling the wrong ‘Times’ font family in font book – I’d disabled ‘Times’ and left ‘Times New Roman’ active. So in running firefox in safe mood I had the following error:

WARNING: Font “Times” with style 0 can’t be handled by the imaging system. This document can’t be drawn/printed with this font.

Going into Font book and enabling Times, this error went away and the page printed.

Obviously this isn’t a great solution, and having to close Firefox to restart in safe-mode just to find out what font you’re missing is a bit stupid to say the least. Why can’t we get a nice dialog box warning, or be allowed to replace problematic fonts? And why do fonts render fine on-screen, but then fail to print?

Versions pertaining to this issue:

• MacBook Pro 2.2GHz
• OS X 10.4
• Firefox 2.0.0.6