"Print to file" silently fails

[Rolf Leggewie]

Not sure what package this bug should be filed against, but I observed the following behaviour on my trusty box.

Open a page in firefox for example or some other document you'd like to print to a PDF. Ctrl+P to print. Select "Print to file". Navigate to the place you would to save to, let's say this was "/tmp/" for simplicity of demonstartion. Make sure there is a directory called /tmp/test.pdf (I know this is silly, but it actually happens quite often accidentally by how selecting a folder and file name are presented in these dialogs). Save the file now as test.pdf. You should receive a warning now that /tmp/test.pdf already exists (the directory) and whether you want to overwrite it. Choose Yes. You'd expect the file to be created now, but actually that is not the case.

[Ubuntu Foundations Team Bug Bot (crichton)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. It seems that your bug report is not filed about a specific source package though, rather it is just filed against Ubuntu in general. It is important that bug reports be filed about source packages so that people interested in the package can find the bugs about it. You can find some hints about determining what package your bug might be about at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/FindRightPackage. You might also ask for help in the #ubuntu-bugs irc channel on Freenode.

To change the source package that this bug is filed about visit https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1490244/+editstatus and add the package name in the text box next to the word Package.

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[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Ads20000 (ads20000)]

Sorry about all that, just trying to work out what package that's having the problem. I think it's a bug in how Firefox interacts with the file system because other programs, like GIMP and LibreOffice, can also export to PDF and this bug doesn't recur.

[Ads200002 (ads200002)]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:40.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/40.0
Build ID: 20150826185918

Steps to reproduce:

1. Create a folder called 'test.pdf' (without quotes (')) somewhere, for example your home directory (/home/adam in my case)
2. Press `Ctrl` + `P` on any (printable) webpage
3. Click 'Print to File'
4. Type 'test.pdf' (without quotes (')) in the 'Name:' box
5. Next to 'Save in Folder:', select the folder that you saved the 'test.pdf' folder in (e.g. /home/adam)
6. Make sure the output format is PDF
7. Click 'Print'
8. When the dialogue asking if you want to replace the existing 'test.pdf' file comes up, click 'Replace'
9. Repeat steps 1-7 with '.ps' instead of '.pdf' and ensure the output format is Postscript in step 6

Actual results:

The printing dialogue comes up and a progress bar appears as usual with 'Completed' appearing very briefly before the dialogue disappears - the same as any other time if you print a PDF or Postscript file. However, no file is created despite you telling it to overwrite the 'test.pdf' folder. No error message appears as it would in other programs that export to PDF like GIMP or LibreOffice.

Expected results:

An error message should've appeared saying that the directory could not be overwritten.

[Ads200002 (ads200002)]

This bug occurs on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. It may be platform-specific, but we won't know until people try to reproduce the bug on other platforms and even Ubuntu versions.

[Epinal99-bugzilla2 (epinal99-bugzilla2)]

Maybe a dupe of bug 1184604 which is fixed in FF41+.

Could you download Beta and test, please.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/beta/all/

[Ads200002 (ads200002)]

Still applies to 45.0.2 (out-of-date, but this is the version in the Ubuntu Yakkety repositories), also still applies to Nightly 49.0a1 (2016-15-11).

[Rolf Leggewie (r0lf)]

Still present in 46.0.1

[Bugzilla-mozilla-org-rolf (bugzilla-mozilla-org-rolf)]

Still present in 46.0.1

[Berend De Schouwer (berend-de-schouwer)]

*** Bug 1292874 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Jonathan Watt (jwatt)]

The fixes for bug 1253247, bug 1270447 and/or bug 1309205 may have fixed this since anyone last looked. However, it may have subsequently been broken again since we now have bug 1471854.

[Ads200002 (ads200002)]

This is fixed as of Firefox 63.0. One can't specify the file type anymore and typing 'test.pdf' and clicking 'Select' now simply opens the folder and then clears the 'Name' field for saving as a file.

[Bugzilla-mozilla-org-rolf (bugzilla-mozilla-org-rolf)]

I can confirm the last comment by ads. It's good to see progress. Unfortunately, there are still some corner cases where this fails and thus I am reopening.

The case I was still able to reproduce is when the file name has already been preselected. Firefox will warn if you want to overwrite the "file" which is actually a directory. Even if confirming to overwrite, the printing then still simply silently fails.