Printer unrecognized in Word v. X

[Betty]

I'm running Office v. X and just got a new printer (a Canon i9100).
After installing the printer drivers, every application I've tried is
able to recognize and print to the printer except one: Microsoft Word.
Even the other applications in Office recognize and print to the new
printer.

When I choose Page Setup in Word, under the "Format For" bar it says
"Any Printer." When I click on that bar, none of my printers are
there (as they normally would be). There's just "Any Printer" or
"Edit Printer List..." Editing the Printer List calls up Print
Center, where all my printers appear with the Canon chosen as the
default. But there doesn't seem to be any way to get Word to
recognize this.

I've tried trashing Word's preferences and the Print Center
preferences and I've also repaired permissions in Disk Utility. I've
also reinstalled the printer driver. Nothing works.

Another clue: if I log in as "root," the problem disappears: I am able
to see the printers from within Word and print to them.

Any help would be much appreciated as this is driving Betty batty!

 

[Jim Gordon]

Hi Betty,

Try running Disk Utility First Aid to repair permissions. It sounds like a
permissions problem to me.

-Jim Gordon
Mac MVP

All responses should be made to this newsgroup within the same thread.
Thanks.

About Microsoft MVPs:
http://www.mvps.org/

Search for help with the free Google search Excel add-in:
<http://www.rondebruin.nl/Google.htm>

 

[Beth Rosengard]

Hi Betty,

This will probably not be much help (since I don't understand printers and
I'm not in OS X) but...

You say you can log in as root and everything works fine. Go over all your
root Page Setup and printer settings with a microscope and then compare them
to your User settings to try to see what's different. You might also try
creating another User to see if the problem exists there as well.

And that's the best I can do.

--
Beth Rosengard
Mac MVP

Mac Word FAQ: <http://www.mvps.org/word/FAQs/WordMac/index.htm>
Entourage Help Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org/toc.html>

 

[Betty]

Hi Betty,

Try running Disk Utility First Aid to repair permissions. It sounds like a
permissions problem to me.

It sounds like one to me too. I've run Disk Utility twice: no dice.

I've also run Print Center Repair, a useful shareware utility: no joy.

It is strange to me that it's *only* Microsoft Word and no other
application that has the problem. I guess I could try reinstalling
Word.

Any other possibilities?

 

[Betty]

I've now tried:

1) Deleting Word's preferences
2) Repairing permissions in Disk Utility
3) Running through all of the various repair routines in the shareware
utility "Print Center Repair"
4) Reinstalling the printer driver
5) Reinstalling Office v. X

I've still had no success and it's getting me down. Of all programs
that I'll need to print in Word is one of the most important (even if
it's a photo printer).

I'm stymied. Short of creating a whole new user identity for myself
and copying everything over (which would take days and never be as
good), I don't know what else to try. I'm sure it's just some pesky
file that has the wrong permissions but I have no idea what it is.

Betty

 

[Betty]

I've now tried:

1) Deleting Word's preferences
2) Repairing permissions in Disk Utility
3) Running through all of the various repair routines in the shareware
utility "Print Center Repair"
4) Reinstalling the printer driver
5) Reinstalling Office v. X
6) Reinstalling the latest Combined updater to 10.2.6

I've still had no success and it's getting me down. Of all programs
that I'll need to print in Word is one of the most important (even if
it's a photo printer).

I'm stymied. Short of creating a whole new user identity for myself
and copying everything over (which would take days and never be as
good), I don't know what else to try. I'm sure it's just some pesky
file that has the wrong permissions but I have no idea what it is.

This is confirmed by the fact that, when I started the machine off a
firewire drive which is an exact mirror of my main drive (but for the
fact that it is running Panther), Word run off of that drive had no
trouble seeing the printer.

I've tried poring through the permission differences, but it's too
much. I don't know what I'm looking for.

I'm about ready to do a full reinstall of the OS, which I'd really
rather not do.

Any further suggestions much appreciated, particularly if they involve
specific files whose permissions I should look at. I'm not a Unix
neophyte and can get around in the Terminal if need be.

Betty

 

[Elliott Roper]

I've now tried:

1) Deleting Word's preferences
2) Repairing permissions in Disk Utility
3) Running through all of the various repair routines in the shareware
utility "Print Center Repair"
4) Reinstalling the printer driver
5) Reinstalling Office v. X
6) Reinstalling the latest Combined updater to 10.2.6

I've still had no success and it's getting me down. Of all programs
that I'll need to print in Word is one of the most important (even if
it's a photo printer).

I'm stymied. Short of creating a whole new user identity for myself
and copying everything over (which would take days and never be as
good), I don't know what else to try. I'm sure it's just some pesky
file that has the wrong permissions but I have no idea what it is.

This is confirmed by the fact that, when I started the machine off a
firewire drive which is an exact mirror of my main drive (but for the
fact that it is running Panther), Word run off of that drive had no
trouble seeing the printer.

I've tried poring through the permission differences, but it's too
much. I don't know what I'm looking for.

I'm about ready to do a full reinstall of the OS, which I'd really
rather not do.

Any further suggestions much appreciated, particularly if they involve
specific files whose permissions I should look at. I'm not a Unix
neophyte and can get around in the Terminal if need be.

Yowsa! What a saga!

For a sanity check, I thought I'd look at matching things here, where
it is working OK
All my PPDs are owned by root or me and all are group admin. They are in
Library/Printers/PPDs/Contents/Resources/en.lproj/

I looked in ~/Library/ for anything word-ish since you problem is just
with one user.
the following is a typical entry for
ls -l /Users/elliott/Library/Preferences/Microsoft

-rw-r--r-- 1 elliott staff 74875 Sep 20 23:36 Word Settings (10)

Here is a partial listing for Office's Application files
[obfuscated:/Applications/Microsoft Office X] elliott% ls -l
total 100984

-rwxrwxrwx 1 elliott admin 1821648 Oct 19 2001 MSN Messenger
-rwxrwxrwx 1 elliott staff 4092548 Jul 3 00:00 Microsoft Entourage
-rwxrwxrwx 1 elliott staff 8441352 Jul 2 00:00 Microsoft Excel
-rwxrwxrwx 1 elliott staff 4944601 Jun 30 00:00 Microsoft
PowerPoint
-rwxrwxrwx 1 elliott staff 10508000 Jul 2 00:00 Microsoft Word
drwxrwxrwx 57 elliott admin 1938 Aug 4 18:02 Office
drwxrwxrwx 9 elliott admin 306 Aug 4 18:02 Read Me
drwxrwxrwx 6 elliott admin 204 Aug 4 18:02 Shared Applications
drwxrwxrwx 20 elliott admin 680 Sep 8 12:26 Templates
-rwxrwxrwx 1 elliott admin 1640920 Oct 19 2001 Welcome

If your owners and groups and privs are OK, and everything else prints,
we have to look for something that is unique to Word. It looks like
Word must be using something of its own to print with and it is
busted/has wrong owner or group or privs. I don't know where to start
looking for that.

Can you print to PDF? Will the PDF print from Adobe Reader and Preview?