# Laser Printer - Really Ugly Web Printing



## Ruler2112 (Dec 16, 2011)

I have a Brother HL-5040 laser printer using the Brother HL-5040 Foomatic/ljet4 driver on my 8.2/amd64 system.  It prints great from Firefox when printing a page with graphics on it and worked perfectly from LibreOffice, GhostPDF, etc.  However, when I print a page with text on it (like a NewEgg order confirmation page), all the text prints in very blocky letters and the spacing is way off.  The header/footer lines appear normally though.

I'm guessing that there's a font or something not installed that should be, but don't even have an idea of where to start looking.  Any hints?


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## Ruler2112 (Dec 16, 2011)

Sample with my info whited out.


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## wblock@ (Dec 16, 2011)

Looks like an outline font is missing and a tiny bitmap font is being scaled up.  Do you have x11-fonts/webfonts installed?


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## Ruler2112 (Dec 19, 2011)

I did not have that port installed - thank you.  It's now printing legibly; although still not quite the way I'm used to (letters are spaced widely), it's certainly nothing I can't live with.


On a semi-related matter, is there a list somewhere of the ports one should install for regular use of a system?  I ask because this is the second or third problem I've had that's been solved by simply installing another port.  While it's nice to have such a simple fix, it's also frustrating to have the problems to begin with.  Even if the webfonts port isn't a dependency of firefox (which I personally believe it should be), a resource to check when installing a new system or having problems would be very, very nice.  Sifting through the seemingly endless number of available ports is rarely fruitful in my experience - always end up installing those that don't fix the problem...


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## wblock@ (Dec 19, 2011)

Ruler2112 said:
			
		

> I did not have that port installed - thank you.  It's now printing legibly; although still not quite the way I'm used to (letters are spaced widely), it's certainly nothing I can't live with.



Add it to xorg.conf, too.  Might not help, but won't hurt:

```
Section "Files"
        ModulePath "/usr/local/lib/xorg/modules"
        FontPath "/usr/local/lib/X11/fonts/bitstream-vera/"
EndSection
```



> On a semi-related matter, is there a list somewhere of the ports one should install for regular use of a system?



It really needs more than a list, but quickly becomes subjective.  There used to be meta-ports that were nothing but dependencies to pull in all the stuff that the meta-port author felt was needed.

It wouldn't be hard to add an option to the Firefox port to add x11-fonts/webfonts to the RUN_DEPENDS list.  Send an email to the Firefox maintainer (which is actually the freebsd-gecko mailing list).


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