PDFs are printing as gibberish

Forum|Forum|8 years ago
September 26, 2017
3 replies
6575 views

When I print PDFs from Adobe Acrobat Reader one of three things happens:

1. the document prints fine

2. the document prints 1-2 lines of gibberish symbols per page until I cancel the print job or turn off the printer. The printer will continue to print gibberish until I take one of these two actions, regardless of the length of the file.

3. the document prints one or several pages accurately and then prints gibberish

Other things I know about the problem:

This happens when printing from my computer and my husband's computer.

One of the things I'm trying to print is a PDF of lecture slides for a class. They are available in a 3 slides/page or 1 slide/page format. The 3/page files print with no problem. The 1/page files always fail.

Things I have tried:

Uninstalling and reinstalling acrobat.

Printing from Foxit, another PDF reader. Same thing happens from there.

I'm being told (by my printer tech support and the adobe tech support people) that all this indicates that there's a problem with the files themselves. But this doesn't make sense, because the other 160 people in my class are not reporting printing problems for the same files.

Any suggestions?

Thanks!

Print and prepress

This topic has been closed for replies.

S

seeingdouble

Participant

I'm using IE 11 on a Windows 7/64 machine. same problem. I am trying to print receipts to a PDF file, not a printer. I just want to keep a file not a piece of paper. For a while now when I go to File --> Print --> Adobe PDF, the file has a lot of gibberish on it when it opens in Adobe. So this isn't about "print drivers" as my printer will print exactly what it sees in the PDF. The garble happens in Adobe when I print to a file. Even if I select the box "Print to File" which is redundant sine Printing to PDF is printing to a file, still get gibberish.

I can download a different, free PDF reader and it offers print to PDF without a problem.

~graffiti

Legend

trillium3333 wrote
I'm being told (by my printer tech support and the adobe tech support people) that all this indicates that there's a problem with the files themselves. But this doesn't make sense, because the other 160 people in my class are not reporting printing problems for the same files.

Well, that could be it. In fact, I'd bet on it if the print driver issue doesn't take care of it. You had to get the file from wherever it lives to your machine and that "may" have been the point of corruption.

T

trillium3333Author

Participant

One other thing I've tried is printing files as an image. Same thing happens.