Question :
I have received an eMail from a vendor that includes a dispatchnote PDF that I need to print.
The PDF opens fine in Preview.app, but when I try to print it, everything seems to work fine, only the print doesn’t come out of the printer…
I can’t find the problem : the PDF appears in the printer’s Job List, the status bar fills up completely, the printer makes some noise to indicate that it is receiving data, the print job is deleted from the Job List, and nothing comes out of the printer… there are no error messages, no indication what so ever that something went wrong… the pint just won’t come out of the printer…
I checked to see if there is something special about the PDF-file that might be causing this, but I can’t find anything special about it… the PDF is not locked or anything…
What can I do ?
Answer :
Even though it is not clear where this problem comes from, the solution is simple : use Adobe Reader (a.k.a. Adobe Acrobat Reader DC) or Adobe Acrobat Pro if you have it.
To do so, do this :
- go to https://get.adobe.com/uk/reader/otherversions/
- at Step 1, 2 and 3 set the right OS, language and version, then click the Download Now button to download Adobe Reader
- when the download is done, install Adobe Reader on your Mac
- then, open Adobe Reader
- and open the hard-to-print PDF from Adobe Reader
- as soon as it starts appearing on-screen, you can press [CMD] + [P] to get to the printing screen
- from there, just try to print again…
- note that this is not your regular macOS printing screen, so you might want to check if all settings are to your liking before you give the actual print-commando (you might have to set things like double sided printing again)
The fact that the file is not printing from Preview.app, but it is from Adobe Reader, might indicate that the PDF was created by Adobe Acrobat Pro on Windows and that there is a problem in the version of Acrobar Reader that was used that causes this problem to arise…
That’s it !
enjoy 😉