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Participant
May 24, 2018
Question

Z@xxx.tmp files in user temp folder causes gibberish font in printout

  • May 24, 2018
  • 2 replies
  • 17529 views

When files of the form Z@xxx.tmp appear in the folder C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local\Temp a Arial TrueType (CID) font appears as gibberish text in the printed output. Is this a bug in Adobe Reader? If yes, when will it be fixed?

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    2 replies

    Legend
    May 24, 2018

    The files being left over is certainly a recurrent issue, and has been discussed somewhat in the forum. It appears to be related to certain Microsoft hotfixes. But I don't recall any discussion of this in connection with garbage text.

    Participant
    July 12, 2018

    Is this post still the recommended work-around? Or has the problem of locked Z@XXX.tmp files been fixed in Adobe Reader? Or some other work-around exists?

    Acrobat/Reader: Z@xxx.tmp files left behind in Temp folder after printing

    My Windows 2012 R2 servers are using the latest version of Adobe Reader DC.

    Legend
    May 24, 2018

    What little I seem to remember of this: such files are temporary fonts, and must be kept until the printing is completed. If you delete them before printing is complete, you will get garbage printed.

    Participant
    May 24, 2018

    Thanks for your reply. That solution does not solve my problem, I am not deleting the Z@XXX.tmp files, the problem is that they are not being deleted by Adobe Reader when Adobe Reader is done with them. Here is the analysis from my SDK vendor:

    "The Z@*.tmp files are temporary font files generated by Adobe Reader. In some cases these Z@*.tmp files can get stuck on the system. We have found particular PDF documents that cause the Z@*.tmp files to get stuck when printed manually from Adobe Reader to any printer.

    In your case there are probably some documents that have a subset of the Arial font embedded, that get registered and stuck on the system. The "E04102018.pdf" file you have sent us earlier uses the Arial font but does not have it embedded in the PDF, so GDI probably ends up using the version that got stuck when printing another document, and this causes the garbage text."