Printing problem with 11x17pages Adobe XI Pro

Hi Dov;

Thank you very much for your time to reply so promptly to my post. Appreciate that.

Our situation is a bit more difficult, due to the fact that we are talking about presses which are developed by OCE and somewhat re-branded with Canon logo.
They are not running EFI rips but OCE Prisma, which we have got all the Canon Printers controlled by.
The PRISMA RIPs and subsequently its drivers are different, as the "additional" elements of the drivers that you pointed out in this thread as most often being an issue, is what makes them favourable in our environment.

We do not print pretty things, where colour accuracy and nice looking artwork is reproduced.

We are more of a information printers (documentation for Clinical Trials and Pharmaceutical market), where colour is important only to distinguish from B&W content. Yet the simplicity of the driver allows for multiple and different types of finishing and mixed media content  to be programmed (within the driver) in as simple way as typing in the page numbers or ranges and defining the additional options for finishing). In order to do that with EFI solutions, you'd need JobMaster / Impose/Compose Suite, which allows for a purely visual operation of this sort.
So the advantage of the Prisma Drivers / RIPs in Production Printing as ours, is not to be beaten by anything else, considering the speed and flexibility.

But unfortunately no generic Canon drivers work with them. The Drivers need to be specifically designed to support this environment and exact printers including the speed license for the machine. So basically there are 2 PostScript drivers and no PCL at all.

And they behave exactly as described earlier. We think to take this issue further to OCE in Venlo, BE so that they could investigate and hopefully develop a fix or revised driver, to address this, as this has been going on for years now ...

And it looks Acrobat is not a true issue here. At least this is what I am finding.

Thank you very much for your valuable input and knowledge shared.

Since my name was used here …

Most of the Adobe staff members who come by here, including myself are not part of Adobe's support organization. We tend to view scan these forums, mostly on our “free time” (whatever that means) and contribute as best we can including, where we can, trying to . But we are not Adobe Tech Support.

That having been said, I have taken a very strong interest in checking the print issues discussed in this thread. I personally have had access to several Adobe PostScript 3-based printers (Xerox, Canon, and Ricoh)supporting paper sizes as large as 12x18 inches. In recent years, I have not been able to duplicate any problems printing 11x17 pages from Acrobat either on Windows or MacOS.

A number of years back, in fact I did observe problems of this type, including problems when dealing with PDF files with mixed page sizes. In each case where there was a problem, it was traced back to PostScript drivers from specific manufacturers that attempted to override the setpagedevice commands setting page sizes and graphics states operators in the PostScript generated by Acrobat or Reader. For PostScript devices (as opposed to other devices), Acrobat and Reader generate their own PostScript based upon the device's PPD and the settings the user specifies in the print dialog. Chaos can ensue if a printer manufacturer's custom PostScript driver plug-in tries to modify this generated PostScript to provide so-called “added value features.” Typically, the problems I saw in the past were remedied if I disabled the printer manufacturer's driver plug-in or used a simplified driver without the manufacturer's “secret sauce.” The reason why you don't see the same problem with some other PDF viewers is that they don't generate PostScript, but rather print using Windows GDI which doesn't enable a number of the advanced features that Acrobat and Reader provide for PostScript printers.

How can you alleviate these issues? You might try seeing if there are newer PostScript drivers for the device in question that you can download and install. In the past when we (i.e., Adobe) or some of our customers pointed out these problem to the printer manufacturers, they adjusted their PostScript drivers not to muck with the PostScript coming out of Acrobat and Reader and/or fixing their PPD file. If there are no newer drivers that fix the problem with the particular printer manufacturer, you may try reaching their technical support folks and reporting the issue. If they cannot fix it, they will usually work directly with us at Adobe to find where the Acrobat/Reader - driver conflict is.

             - Dov

Perhaps an older “Reader” basic version (and probably would be free download) . I’m going to try this next. Perhaps if that can be installed that would allow for making a combined pdf from excel sheets that will print out correctly.

I’ll have to check with our IT guy to make sure it doesn’t conflict with the suite of programs that are new and that it can be a separate piece of software to use.

Have you installed the latest update? Version 11.0.7 is available.

Can Reader X be installed on a box running Acrobat XI ?

I attached a copy of  PDF and a scan of the printing result so that you can see what happens. I am printing to a Xerox 7435 colour printer. I don't have this problem when I open the PDF with Reader. Dov Isaacs indicated that this is an Acrobat X Pro issue and nothing do do wiht the printer.  Also, occasionally when I print, the first page are rotated 180 degrees which is a real pain when printing 2-sided.

When printing from Acrobat, do you select the paper size from the Properties dialog (accessed next to the printer name in the print dialog)? Or are you checking the Choose paper source by PDF page size option?

If the latter, there is a known issue, especially for PDF files with mixed page sizes. If you don't have mixed page sizes, use the Properties dialog to set the paper size through the print driver and see if that fixes the problem.

          - Dov