The TextLayer sometimes becomes visible when printing

[waddlesplash]

Reported by bwalker in IRC, this pdf's textLayer sometimes appears in the printed version (page 8 for him and for me).

I've seen this before on some PDFs like this one (which also happens to cause "Error occurred while printing" about 50% of the time), but nothing 100% reproducible like the above.

(Happens for me using a HP LaserJet, and "Microsoft XPS Document Writer" printers.)

Win8.1, FF 36.0.1, PDFjs 1.0.1194.

[waddlesplash]

Hmm, it appears my initial analysis was wrong. Somehow the font suddenly changes from one page to the next...? That doesn't make much sense.

[waddlesplash]

@waddlesplash silently wonders if @Snuffleupagus will one day in a fit of rage scrap canvas-based text rendering and just use freetype2.js for everything.

[Snuffleupagus]

I'm assuming that this issue is related to the CLEANUP_TIMEOUT and thus most likely a duplicate of issues such as #5006, #5058 and #5279.

One way to improve the printing experience might be to not actually use the canvas back-end, but use SVG instead. Unfortunately the SVG back-end isn't yet feature complete, and I don't think anyone is currently working on it, but the SVG viewer lives here.

PS. @waddlesplash From reading IRC scrollback, it appears that you had trouble getting #textLayer=visible to work. Please note that for various reasons we've disabled the debugging hash parameters by default, see Debugging PDF.js for instructions on activating them.

[waddlesplash]

PS. @waddlesplash From reading IRC scrollback, it appears that you had trouble getting #textLayer=visible to work.

I did, but I just gave up and opened the browser console and made the textLayer visible that way.

[Snuffleupagus]

Closing as duplicate of issue #5006.