Last modified: 2012-02-22 12:36:22 UTC
I have found out (the hard way, i.e. by wasting paper -;) that the HDMI page on Wikipedia doesn't print correctly with IE7: some pages are output as blank. The problem doesn't occur with other browsers. It has been repro'ed on two vastly different Windows XP Pro SP3 computers, using completely different printers / printer drivers. The attached zipfile shows results produced with various browsers, using Adobe's "PDF printer."
Created attachment 5647 [details] Sample printouts
Tried this myself with IE7/XP SP3. The same thing seems to happen on other pages, examples being [[Blu-Ray Disc]], [[Hanford Site]] and [[Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard]], but not all pages. On some of them, only parts of pages are blanked out. I can't see anything that the affected pages have in common other than being quite long.
Likely related to or the same as bug 12291
*** Bug 17973 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Ran into this today with a user at [[Talk:Asthma#Why can I not print this article after page 16?]]: The user reported several blank pages upon printing (and print previewing) the article [[Asthma]]. I was able to reproduce the problem in IE 7, down to the same blank page numbers reported by the user. There were no likely culprits in the content at the points it went blank (no images, tables, templates, etc.). To check for formatting anomalies anyway, I copied a few pages of the text (including parts that had and had not printed) into a sandbox; it happened again—but at different points in the text. Occurs when using the printable version, too. Of the articles others noted above, I get blank pages in HDMI and Blu-Ray Disc but not Hanford Site.
On en.wp we suspect this is caused by the CSS property line-height. See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_talk:Common.css/Archive_7#Printing_issues_with_IE7 We were thinking of adding this to a IE specific CSS stylesheet on en.wp, if that does solve the issue, perhaps we can "upmerge" that.... ?
Update Web browser.
Adding testme. Please test with Internet Explorer 8 and note the result here.
Seems to work fine with IE8 -- see attached results.
Created attachment 6195 [details] Results with IE8
Closing WONTFIX. Work-around is to update to IE8 per comment 9.
While this is a technically acceptable workaround, I have to note that many corporations (such as the company I work for) prohibit migration to IE8 -- until all browser-related applications have been adapted to IE8, that is.
*** Bug 8204 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 12291 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
