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BillBarr
Participant
April 13, 2018
Question

Adobe products printing double vision suddenly

  • April 13, 2018
  • 1 reply
  • 3935 views

Yesterday, suddenly, Acrobat Pro (subscription paid for, but not on Cloud) started printing hard copies weird. I don't know the official name of what it is doing, but I would call it overprinting - everything is printed twice - one is just a hair and a half off the first one. This means that it is really blurry. Checked for updates to Acrobat and they are up to date. Not a printer problem as things from Word, Excel etc. print fine, as do things directly off a website (i.e. irs.gov). So, I tried a file in Photoshop - it too overprinted. BUT, when I try to print an old pdf file saved several years ago, it prints fine.

I am stumped. I am using Win 7, a current version of Acrobat XI Pro, an old version of Photoshop (CS3, I think), and have a Xerox Phaser 6700. I can't find a chat line or phone number to talk to anyone at Adobe and have no clue where to go from here. Can you guys help?

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    1 reply

    Abambo
    Community Expert
    AbamboCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    April 13, 2018

    Hi,

    Out of my memory and with very little information available, I would say, that your printer is doing an RGB to CMYK print the bad way.

    I explain: When you convert Black (C0,M0,Y0, K1) to RGB you will get 0,0,0 as RGB (the same happens, when your data ​is RGB coloured​). When converting that back to CMYK, the way your printer gets colour on the sheet, it may be, that your black colour will be represented by some mixture of C, M, Y and K values, instead of pure black. That results in some "dirty" dark colour and could optically be the phenomena you described.

    If that does not help you to get the right clues to solve the problem by yourself, then I would need further information:

    BillBarr  wrote

    Yesterday, suddenly, Acrobat Pro (subscription paid for, but not on Cloud) started printing hard copies weird.

    (...)

    a current version of Acrobat XI Pro

    Do you have Acrobat DC Pro? Or do you have Acrobat XI Pro?

    I would like to see a picture of your "double prints". You can take a picture or scan a sheet. As long as the scan or the picture shows of the problem, we can work with it.

    It would also be nice if you could share a problematic PDF file with us. Something that does not show confidential data.

    Else, I would be interested in your printing parameters for a PDF file that works (a link to the file would be nice, if it comes from a publicly accessible source) and a PDF file that doesn't (the one you could share with us would be ideal). You can share the printing parameters by doing a screen copy and pasting that here.

    If you have a second computer, you could also try to see if the problem replicates to that computer.

    ABAMBO | Hard- and Software Engineer | Photographer
    B
    BillBarrAuthor
    Participant
    April 13, 2018

    Hi there...

    I have Acrobat XI Pro on subscription - says it is up to date on its updates. And this just started yesterday afternoon. Nothing weird that I know of happened between yesterday morning and yesterday afternoon. Avast antivirus has not alerted me to anything, and I would be surprised if a virus would just affect Adobe products.

    Printing off 2nd computer with the same printer is fine - no double-printing. (I would call this over-printing except Photoshop uses this term for something else entirely.) I sent a photoshop doc to a friend who printed it off her computer onto her printer and it was fine. Can not share that one as it is protected data.

    Below is a snipped clip of a blank IRS form. I printed it hard copy (so I could do the math by hand) and it came out like this. Then I scanned the hard copy print and that's what is here. If I print directly from the IRS website without downloading it, it does fine.


    It is not just the IRS website. Was trying to get a year's worth of bank statements (it is tax time) and they are in pdf. They also double-printed.

    You asked for a problematic pdf file. Uhm... they look fine on screen - it is when I print hard copies that they go funky. Also, the old pdf docs that worked ok are things I saved last year or so. Some scanned to pdf, some downloaded from various websites. No link that I can provide.

    The RGB/CMYK thing is not likely to be the problem since it is also doing this on pdf, Acrobat does not have settings for RGB/CMYK to my knowledge.

    Still stumped...

    Abambo
    Community Expert
    AbamboCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    April 15, 2018

    Printing off 2nd computer with the same printer is fine - no double-printing. (I would call this over-printing except Photoshop uses this term for something else entirely.) I sent a photoshop doc to a friend who printed it off her computer onto her printer and it was fine. Can not share that one as it is protected data.

    May be you should look into your print settings. Wrong paper quality could produce something like that.

    Try also to use “print as image” on the advanced tab.

    Acrobat does handle CMYK/RGB data, but the phenomena described happened at the time when converting Word files to PDF for print preparation. However, the effect is less visible.

    Your’s reminds me of a high quality print (where the print head moves more that once over the same paper place) and a paper moving in between.

    It may be a software problem but my first guess would be a mechanical problem.

    Look into the printer config of the second computer. May be you find a significant difference: Printer settings, driver versions, different Acrobat version...

    Acrobat XI is out of support, there will be no more updates. Adobe Acrobat XI and Adobe Reader XI End of Support | Adobe Blog

    You could try printing with Acrobat DC (the free Acrobat reader), to cross check.

    You could also look at the printing parameters in other software, where the print happens to be correct.

    ABAMBO | Hard- and Software Engineer | Photographer
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