Adobe PDFs printing text as boxes and random characters

[generous_captain7967]

Hello,

I have a user who is printing from Acrobat and the text is printing as random characters or boxes on select documents. This occurs on any printer, and the file appears normal when previewing it in Acrobat.

The user will print several documents from the same source, which are all formatted the same, but only select ones have an issue printing correctly. The issue is occurring with select documents from several sources. The user is receiving these documents by email, and when they print out of the email directly, they print normally. However, once the document is saved and printed through Adobe it prints incorrectly. 

Adobe is up to date, and the "save as optimizes for fast web view" setting is turned off.

Any other ideas?

[creative explorer]

@generous_captain7967 right off the bat, when was the last time the printer driver or firmware is updated? If the printer driver is updated, the fonts are either corrupted or not embedded correctly. PDFs can embed fonts, but sometimes only a subset of the characters used are included to reduce file size. If Acrobat is trying to access characters not embedded, it might substitute them with incorrect ones or display them as boxes. This could explain why some documents are affected and others aren't. Now saying that, there might be a conflict between the fonts embedded in the PDF and fonts installed on the user's system. Acrobat might be substituting fonts incorrectly, leading to the garbled text.

You could try selecting "Print as Image." This will rasterize the entire document, potentially bypassing font rendering issues. This might reduce print quality slightly, but it's a good test.