Sporadic Printing Problems

[Ben1637]

Hi Everybody,

I use Acrobat 6 Professional.

I am having some very strange, sporadic printing problems that are driving me nuts. Any help and/or suggestions you may have would be greatly appreciated.

The PDF was originally converted from Word. It's ultimately several documents pieced together in Acrobat, resulting in a 190+ page PDF. Many of the pages contain tables, shading, etc.

Examples of some of the printing problems:
- periodically, words have spaces in the middle of them
- a couple letters are overlapped
- many, many boxes (look like checkboxes) are printed near the margin of the page
- Printing the doc with errors and then closing the doc, reopening and printing again, prints fine, without any errors
- Some pages will print fine at one point and then when the pages are printed again, they contain some of the errors mentioned above
- Most of the time, the doc looks perfect on the screen, the errors only appear when printed.

Is there a setting somewhere that I am missing? Is it a font problem? My understanding is that when converting a Word doc with Acrobat 6, it uses Distiller, which historically has helped with font overlap issues. But, I still have them and it looks fine on the screen, which I know is unusual. Is the PDF too large? Even printing a few pages at a time results in the above errors. GRRR! I'm really at the end of my rope with this, so I welcome any and all suggestions!

Many thanks, in advance!!

 

[Eggles]

I have only just seen this post, so perhaps it is resolved now. But all the errors you are seeing are related to font problems - specifically, the Word fonts have not been embedded properly in the PDF - either because of the job options setting used, or perhaps the font has embedding restrictions.

The spaces between, and overlapping of, letters indicates some other (similar but not the same) font is being used by your computer because it doen't have access to the one used in the PDF. The checkboxes indicate your computer cannot even guess at a substitute for the font.

There may be a setting in your printer's dialog box that allows you to úse printer fonts' or 'download soft fonts' or some other message - try the other alternatives to those checked or not checked, but I think you will have to accept that if you cannot get the PDF recreated by the maker, and this time embed the fonts, then you will have to live with its printed appearance.