Others Having Trouble Printing PDFs I Make

Hi Everyone,

I’m using an updated version of Adobe Acrobat on a Windows 11 machine, using an Adobe Acrobat Individual license.

I know this may be a hard question for y’all to answer, but I would love any ideas, even if they are long shots. This is a nightmarish problem for our small business. Here’s what’s happening:

We use Acrobat to create multi-page PDF documents for our clients, who are schools (the documents are teaching materials that are printed for students). We are not present when these materials are printed. We’re creating them and sending them over and the schools print them. Over the last year, we have updated, edited, and rearranged pages in a number of our materials, and during that same timeframe we have noticed our clients struggling to print them. I cannot, however, provide any of the error messages or exact details about what’s happening, because the schools are not tech savvy enough to describe the issue or send me the error messages. They just send us emails like “It won’t print” or “It gave us an error” or “It won’t print after page 6”. 

When I examine the documents and/or print on our computers and printers everything looks fine and prints fine. I’ve also examined the security settings and there’s no restriction on printing.

At one school I was able to see one of the issues: a page which was supposed to consist of a number of small sketches floating around the page, with a big image in the middle, printed instead as the big image surrounded by a number of solid black rectangles (obviously each of the small images printed as solid black). 

Call me old fashioned, but I thought the whole point of the Portable Document Format was that it was cross compatible with everything and could be printed without the other computer having the right fonts, programs, or same operating system (by the way, almost all the schools use Apple products, if that helps troubleshoot). 

I know I’m not giving y’all much to work with, but do you have any advice? Is there some way to investigate or prevent this problem? Is there a way to make “safe mode” PDFs or something so that they’re more likely to work properly once they’re out of our hands?

Thanks,

Alexander