Printing PDFs in Preview and Adobe Reader

C

cfish

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Hey everyone,

I'm running a MacBook Pro, Mac OS X 10.4.11 (Tiger), 1.67 GHz PowerPC G4, Preview 3.0.9 and Adobe Reader 8.1.6.

I can't print PDFs from Reader. They either print out with blocks of text instead of the letters and with the 'Use local fonts' option deselected it prints out no text, just the formatting.

I can usually get around this by printing the PDFs in Preview. Except for a few. Some I get and print out without letters in them. As in it looks like this:

'Hi, h w ar ou t d y '

seemingly randomly. I am inclined to think it's the way the PDFs are put together on the other end of the line, but no-one else has a problem printing them so it must be the software on my computer.

Any suggestions?
 
Are the PDFs appearing normal when you are viewing them in Reader?

I assume that the PDFs contain fonts that are not installed on your system, causing text appearance inconsistencies when printing from Adobe Reader. I think Preview opens them and converts them automatically before printing. You just have to tell Reader to do the same.

Try this, in the print dialogue box, click on the "Advanced..." button, make sure the "Print as Image" box is selected, click OK and print.
 
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Definitely find out from whomever you got the pdfs from how they are ripping their files. They should be at least PDF/x-1a for best chance of printing (and embedding fonts).
 
Greg_Reez said:
...

I assume that the PDFs contain fonts that are not installed on your system, causing text appearance inconsistencies when printing from Adobe Reader. I think Preview opens them and converts them automatically before printing. You just have to tell Reader to do the same.

Try this, in the print dialogue box, click on the "Advanced..." button, make sure the "Print as Image" box is selected, click OK and print.
Click to expand...
Print as Image is a solution to certain problems, but missing fonts is not one of them. There is no reader-side solution to missing fonts. The workaround is to substitute or to create a font with the same metrics as the missing font.

The only solution to missing fonts problem lies on the creation side. The solution is to always embed your fonts. This is the default for Acrobat Distiller and for MacOS X's print to PDF facility.
 
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