Printing issues with some PDFs [LWN.net]

Printing issues with some PDFs

Posted Nov 30, 2004 19:21 UTC (Tue) by jeskritt (guest, #4092)
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's Guide to PDF Viewers

I find that a number of PDFs fail to print on non-windows machines, particularly with technical papers. I think it's from using the PDF writer from with in MS Office. I don't have any proof though.

I have a Mac G4, a x86 Linux box and a SPARC Solaris machine on my desk at work. Even using Adobe Acrobat reader for each platform I can't print some PDFs. They print without error, but nothing comes out of the printer. I can print to postscript and dump the PS to the print and still nothing comes out. If I print the PDF to a PS file and use ps2ps I get PS stack errors.

I find the only way for me to print these files (other than finding someone with a windows machine to do it for me) is to use OS X's Preview program. It prints them no problem. I can also use it to print to PDF and those PDFs will print on non-windows machines.

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Printing issues with some PDFs

Posted Dec 21, 2004 1:22 UTC (Tue) by freeid (guest, #22401) [Link]

When I've had this problem I've always been able to circumvent it by either choosing another Posctscript level from Acrobat Reader or using Ghostscript's pdf2ps utility.

Printing issues with some PDFs

Posted Dec 22, 2004 7:16 UTC (Wed) by barrygould (guest, #4774) [Link]

I've had problems like that (on Windows) with a Lexmark Optra R laser... solution was to get a new PostScript ROM from Lexmark.

(Or, you can use a PCL driver instead of PostScript)

Barry