Friday, March 27, 2020

HP Photosmart C4750 misprinting in Windows 10 with Adobe and MS Word.

Because this information should be available to Microsoft, Adobe, and HP, I"m putting it here.  I created a document in Microsoft Word.  Printing it from Microsoft Word mostly works fine.

I printed it to a PDF using doPDF and the resulting file looks great. In Adobe Reader, I printed it to my HP Photosmart C4750 and one of the options was "Save ink/toner." There is a help link that leads to Adobe's site, so I assume that Adobe is responsible for the problem, described below.

I printed the resulting PDF and everything was printed twice, the second copy being about 1/3 of a millimeter below the first copy, and little bit lighter. I figured my ink cartridges might be misaligned, so I printed the alignment page, scanned it, the printer reported that they were aligned, and then I tried again.  The problem persisted.  I saw that the "Save ink/toner" option was on, so I turned it off, and then the PDF came out almost perfectly. There is a textbox (created by MS Word) on the PDF and that box, and only that box, and all the text in it, still shows the problem. However, the problem shows up on that textbox even when I print directly from MS Word, so it is likely the case that some particular instructions between the HP printer and the software delivering printing commands to it is causing this problem, and that the Adobe printer uses them to "save ink/toner" while MS Word uses it for textboxes.