Few pages print fine, print all pages and there's trouble.

[Ben Dupre]

I have a 400+ page PDF file created primarily from Excel worksheets printed through distiller and assembled in Acrobat 6. Some pages are landscape and some are portrait.

You can print a few pages at a time and everything comes out fine. The interspersed landscape pages rotate properly on their own. All the type appears normal.

When you send the entire 400+ page document to the printer, some of the bold type goes haywire. Some of the characters on a line will print on top of each other. The font is Arial Bold MT. Regular Arial prints fine. Also, all of the landscape pages print in portrait. Half of the image is cut off.

Can anyone give me a clue where to start? Are there any known issues? I have a deadline and I'm sweating bullets right now!

Thanks,

Ben

[Ravi_Sharma@adobeforums.com]

How big are your excel tables? Do they go over more than one page? If so, are you shrinking down the sheets? What point size are you ending up with in the "printed" file?

Try closing down as much extraneous software as possible as it may be a resource issue as well.

[Ben Dupre]

The worksheets are several pages. Some are set up one page per worksheet (tab), some are several pages per worksheet (tab).

Everything is printed at 100%. In the PDF file, the text is very close to 100% for example 8.004 pts.

We've tried it on three different computers and three different printers. All the printers are postscript. The computers aren't resource limited as far as I can tell. They are HP/Compaq 2.8 GHz hyperthreaded pentium 4's with 1024 MB RAM. The printers are a Xerox phaser 8200, HP 8100N, and a Ricoh high speed digital copier at our printer.

Everything looks normal in the PDF file. The fonts display fine. The landscape pages appear landscaped.

Ben

[Ravi_Sharma@adobeforums.com]

Whne you say that regular arial prints fine, does that mean for the whole 400 page run? Are your margins set up correctly? Can you make a copy of the file and then with the copy open, set the default printer to the PDF printer? Perhaps its a raster mismatch and the software goes a little funky.

Also, try printing the one page from the seemingly badly formatted pdf. There are times that the printer will not print exaclty as displayed on the monitor.

[Ben Dupre]

There are some new print options in Acrobat 6. There's a "font and resource policy" setting that can be set to three possible options:

send at start
send by range
send for each page

Send by range seems to be the default. Will changing this setting affect my font problem?

Ben

[Ravi_Sharma@adobeforums.com]

I'm not too sure, the only way to check is to try all the settings. Probably send for each page may work best.

[Ian_Burton@home_in_Paris.fr]

Ben,
I think you've found the solution to your own problem. Look in the Help file at the section "Setting advanced print options". Item 3, second bullet states: "Send by range downloads fonts and resources before printing the first page that uses them, and then discards them when they are no longer needed. This option uses less printer memory [less than Send at Start - IB]. However, if a Postscript processor reorders the pages later in the workflow, it might not reorder the font downloading correctly, resulting in missing fonts."

I would guess from this that your PDF assembly operation may be disturbing the order of font downloading as stated in the Help. I would try the other two settings. Note that the Send by Range seems to be an unalterable default - I can't get it to stick like other settings - it seems you have to set it for each print job where you need something other than Send by Range.
Cheers
Ian

[Ben Dupre]

New developments:

I actually can print the entire file without problems. My printer is having problems with it. I'm going over there tomorrow to see if I can help. I don't even know what kind of set-up they have except that they are using Acrobat 6 and the output device is a Ricoh coppier. The important thing is the print driver between the computer and the copier, right? Any suggestions what to look for?

I asked them to change the font and resource policy to "send for each page" and run the file out again, but I got back the same garbage. At this point, I'm not sure whether the made the change or not. I was for certain that would be the answer.

But I still don't have a clue why the landscape pages aren't rotating properly.

Ben

[Horace_Smith@adobeforums.com]

Ben Dupre,

This has nothing to do with your problem, but how did you measure 8.004 points?

[Ben Dupre]

If you select text in Acrobat with the touch-up tool, you can right-click to observe properties and the font and point size are given there along with some other basic info.

Ben