Distorted Graphic Components When Printing PDF Files

[Chris_Heard@adobeforums.com]

I am having the same problem and it is not attributable to the printer driver for my HP DeskJet 5550.

- Word document prints fine.
- PDF document generated from that word document prints fine in Preview.
- Same PDF document prints with skewed images when printed from Acrobat.

Apparently no help has been forthcoming on this issue?

[MikeKazlow@adobeforums.com]

Chris,

It is not cut and dry that if you can print well from most programs and
not another that the program is at fault. The program may indeed be at
fault, BUT it could be that a properly written program can push the
limits of what the driver can handle. In some cases its not the driver,
but the printer itself. However, this happens more often with
clonescript printers, as opposed to true postscript printers.

Mike

[Bob_Kahn@adobeforums.com]

All,

I have an HP Officejet 7410 inkjet all-in-one, and I've been having this same problem printing PDF files containing JPEGs and other images, from both Acrobat 6 and Acrobat 7, using both OS 10.3.x (Panther )and OS 10.4.x (Tiger). I'm now using the very latest HP driver for the 7410 (just released a week ago) and although HP has fixed a number of other problems, this PDF printing problem still persists.

An HP Mac Tech Support Rep said that he has received several reports of this behavior, and he thinks it has something to do with an Acrobat preference for ASCII vs Binary data, though I can't find any preferences of this nature in Acrobat Pro.

Here's one really odd situation: Using MS Word, I created a 6-page, 2-column document with 9 embedded JPEG photos. I then distilled this document into PDF, which looks just fine on the screen.

When I print this document on the Officejet directly from Word, all the images print just fine. The PDF version also prints just fine from Apple's Preview. However, if I try to print the PDF version from Acrobat 7.0.x, some of the images print correctly, but most are distorted beyond recognition. I adjusted and sized all of these images using Photoshop, so it's strange that some of them print ok and others don't.

I've also noticed this problem when printing PDF files, such as user manuals, downloaded from the Web that have embedded screen shots. If I want to ensure that the graphics in a PDF print properly on the Officejet 7410, I have to print the PDF from Preview, rather than from Acrobat.

Most important, I never have any problems printing PDF files with graphics directly from Acrobat on an HP Color Laserjet 4600, which is a Postscript-compatible printer.

Thus, it's not the HP inkjet drivers, per se, that are causing the problem. However, HP Inkjet printers are not Postscript-compatible. So, I suspect that the problem has something to do with the Postscript conversion or emulation that happens when PDF documents are printed to HP inkjet printers. There must be some difference between the way Apple's Preview sends Postscript output to the HP inkjet drivers and the way Adobe Acrobat sends Postscript output to the HP drivers.

It would be nice if soomeone at Adobe could look into this, because it's really a pain to have to re-open PDFs with embedded graphics in Preview in order to print them on an Officejet.

Bob

[MikeKazlow@adobeforums.com]

Bob,

Try to use the print as image. If the file prints properly, then the
issue is the printer driver.

Mike

[Correction]

It is not cut and dry that if you can print well from most programs and
not another that the program is at fault. The program may indeed be at
fault, BUT it could be that a properly written program can push the
limits of what the driver can handle. In some cases its not the driver,
but the printer itself. However, this happens more often with
clone script printers, as opposed to true postscript printers.

Mike, "pushing the limits of what the driver can handle" makes no sense and suggesting that "well written software" can do such a thing demonstrates a deep misunderstanding of the principle of system orthogonality as well as computing in general. Please refrain from commenting unless you fully understand the concepts at hand.