I've been experiencing frustrating issues with PDFs printing out gibberish since mid-December. This is happening across several applications like Edge, Adobe, and Bluebeam on both Windows 11 and server environments with mixed versions. The printers are primarily Ricoh copiers, but occasionally HPs have the same issue. I've tried updating printer drivers, but that hasn't helped. I'm wondering if a Windows update around December could be the culprit since there were issues reported with Windows 10. The files causing problems are from various external vendors, and it's inconsistent which PDFs fail to print correctly. Has anyone else encountered this problem?
4 Answers
You could also be facing compatibility issues from the print server drivers. Check if the wrong drivers are installed or mismatched with the printer protocols—it can get really glitchy if that’s the case. Switching from PS to PCL drivers (or vice versa) might help, depending on your setup.
I’ve dealt with similar issues, and I've found that sometimes it’s about the printer control stream getting messed up. If the printer is mismatched in terms of what it expects for protocols, it can misread the incoming data as literal ASCII. Re-adding the printer setup helped me in the past. Just a thought!
You’re definitely not alone! We've been having a similar situation with our MSP handling the print server. They suggested reinstalling the printer every time, but the fix never lasts long and the paper waste is infuriating. We suspect it’s related to the PCL6 drivers after the last Windows update too.
It might be a font issue where some fonts are not recognized by the systems. Are these problematic PDFs from new vendors or formats? If the fonts in the PDFs aren’t universally accessible, that could cause the garbled output. Also, don’t forget that PDFs are supposed to preserve font integrity, but sometimes that doesn't hold up in practice!
I completely get that! It used to be that PDFs circumvented font issues, but with certain configurations, this can definitely happen.
Exactly! If something interrupts the data being sent, it can really confuse the printer. It's frustrating when a simple fix can go such a long way.