Printing a PDF results in garbled text (sometimes)

We have a system that renders a report as a PDF, and displays it in the browser for the user. In the browser, the document always appears to display fine, but when printed on one machine, it sometimes changes some of the data in the report to seemingly random characters. Here are some examples of the strings it inserts:

Ebuf; Bvhvt ul1: -!3122 Ti jqqf e!Wjb; Nfttf ohf s!Tf swjdf 

Additionally, the inter-character spacing is weird. It sometimes writes characters overlapping each other. I noticed some repetition in the garbled text, so I typed a few of them into Google, and surprisingly got a lot of hits. Here is the string I searched for: pdf cjmp ebuf nftf up! The Google search summaries contain the garbled text. However, when I click on those links in Google, I get perfectly readable PDF files. It's as if Google's PDF crawler has the same bug. Has anyone figured this out? Is this an Acrobat Reader bug?

Have you tried reading the PDFs in another viewer (such as sumatra)? or printing/creating them with a different method (Cutepdf, pdfcreator, openoffice, etc)?

@MaQleod - it's not readily reproducible. Opening the same report again and printing it a second time seems to print it just fine. Also, on other computers it doesn't seem to happen. I don't have the option to open the report in a different viewer because the PDF is streamed from a report server and opened in Internet Explorer.

7 Answers 7

I noticed that there were lots of good suggestions for how to fix this printing issue, but I thought it might be interesting and useful to post an explanation of the underlying cause.

It appears that these PDF misprints are due to a character encoding problem. All the ASCII characters are showing up as 1 higher than they should be (see ASCII character table here).

For example, the letter "D" is showing up as "E", and the letter "b" is showing up as "a". White "space" shows up as "!", and ":" shows up as ";". *Note that whitespace in the garbled PDF doesn't mean anything. "space" shows up as "!".

Here is the example string from the original post:

Ebuf; Bvhvt ul1: -!3122 Ti jqqf e!Wjb; Nfttf ohf s!Tf swjdf 

Correcting for the "+1" encoding error, we get:

Date: Augustk09, 2011 Shipped Via: Messenger Service 

I suspect that the l on line 2 of the example was probably a ! , which would be a "space" such that the correct message would read:

Date: August 09, 2011 Shipped Via: Messenger Service 

One fix which overcomes lots of Acrobat printing problems is to "Print as Image". As shown in the link, you can select that at print time, under the "advanced" button. Unfortunately it can also mean that the print jobs become significantly larger (this is printer and job dependent).

Another thing you can do is to try a different PDF reader (e.g. Foxit or CutePDF) but organisational readers may make this impossible.

Short Answer Uncheck "Rely on system fonts" in Acrobat Printer as follows: 1. Request to print the page (however you do that). 2. Select "Acrobat" as the printer (uses Acrobat Distiller) 3. Click on Acrobat Printer's "Properties" tab. 4. Go to bottom of dialog and UN-check "Rely on system fonts". 5. Click OK. Then "OK" again to print.

Long Answer I suffered the same garbled text problem today while trying to print an online receipt to the Acrobat printer (aka "distiller"). I have Acrobat XI Pro installed.

Previously, when I had the same problem, I used the "Print as Image" option which fixed it but at the large expense of creating a huge digital image file whereas a true Acrobat image is quite small in comparison.

Today, while searching for the "Print as Image" option, I noticed on the 1st Acrobat Printer Properties dialog window, there was a checked box near the bottom that was enabling "Rely on system fonts". That seems like a bad choice in any case because you never know if your system's fonts will exactly match the document fonts. When they don't, I assume there would have to be some kind of substitution logic being performed. If it cannot find a close visual relative, it probably uses something wild or just barfs into the file (which it does look like :-)

So, I unchecked that option and, voila, the page printed with all the text correct. I thought I had a side effect when the background behind the text was a light gray so I printed to Microsoft XPS which is a nice alternative to Acrobat. It also showed the gray background so I assume the web page that was offered that up when I clicked the web page's Print Page button and it did, indeed, have the same gray background. The fonts matched exactly as well so I think it's all correct.

So, problem solved. When I repeated this method, I noticed the option was re-enabled so you have to do it each time or find the option to permanently set it to disabled. For now, I will reserved judgement on whether to make it permanent and just uncheck it when Acrobat decides to barf.

Lastly, in one of my tests, I did come across an Acrobat text log file in which it said, Font not found", further validating my supposition as to what the problem was.

[unsolicited opinion] I, like so many others, can't wait for Adobe to go under or get some humility so we can buy and own our products rather being forced pay a mafia fee or lose use of our products. For now, I'll keep using the last purchasable versions until I am forced to look elsewhere. The competition is slowly closing in. [end of diatribe]