Printing a document in Word 2003 and individual characters don't p

[melissa2186]

In several documents at my office, one in Excel and others in Word 2003, the
text will all look fine on the screen and show up in the print preview. When
the document prints, though, several characters might get left out, as if
they weren't even there to begin with. It happens most often with the
capital H, but others as well. And it's not consistent, you can print it out
again and it might be fine. The letters are right in the middle of other
text, whether it's a heading or a cell in Excel.

Any ideas why this could be happening? It's hard to test for since it isn't
always happening and it has occurred on several different people's machines.
One example of an issue is in a line in front of me that printed as "STATE SC
OOLS of C ARACTER" when it should say schools and character respectively.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

It sounds as if someone has installed software to make your computer think
it's an old-fashioned typewriter with a missing typebar!

As you've acknowledged, intermittent problems are always the hardest to
diagnose and troubleshoot, but here's a start. Are all the documents being
printed to the same printer using the same printer driver? If so, is there a
different printer or driver that could be used for testing?

In the printer Properties somewhere, you may find a setting that determines
whether the printer uses internal fonts (if any) or creates characters on
the fly based on information downloaded from Windows ("Send TrueType as
Bitmaps" is how my printer Properties phrase it). There are also settings
(both in Word and in the printer Properties) that determine how a document
is sent to the printer. You can try enabling/disabling "Background printing"
in Word (Tools | Options | Print) and check the printer Properties for
options regarding spooling. Sometimes it's necessary to enable "Print
directly to the printer" to make things work.

I suspect none of the above will be particularly helpful, so I'm
cross-posting this to the word.printingfonts newsgroup, where perhaps
someone more knowledgeable will take up your case.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
http://word.mvps.org

 

[Tom Ferguson]

The problem you describe, in my experience, is most often caused by problems
with the font file, itself. In some cases, the font is a demo version of the
proper font and does not contain glyphs for all character codes. In other
cases, the font is a poorly converted from one format to another and the
file for the end result contains corrupted tables or is missing necessary
tables.

Do you get the same or similar errors with a variety of fonts from different
sources? Are just one type of font affected {TrueType, OpenType, Postscript}
Does changing the designated font fix the errors?

Tom Ferguson