Troubleshooting Print Problems


February 11, 2000 - This week’s article is in response to the recent problems in the labs related to printing from PageMaker, Illustrator or Quark. There are a lot of ways that you can "debug" your documents, isolate the problem areas, and save your long hours of work from being wasted. These techniques can really save your skin out in the professional world.

If you are getting a specific error, you should be aware that most of the error numbers you get refer to a specific problem with the printer or the document. Unfortunately, the real language equivalent is not much more help than the error number. For example, PostScript error —8133 is defined as nothing more than a general Macintosh PostScript error. Not a lot of help, is it? Fortunately, a lot of printing errors can be isolated to one or two elements of a document that have been corrupted. Often, replacing these elements with fresh copies will clear up the errors.

Let’s look at a general sequence of actions you can use to find and fix these problems.

1. If you have a multi-page document, try printing each page separately. This way, you can determine exactly which page will not print. For example, if you have a five-page document that will not print when you send all pages, you may be able to print some of the pages. Whatever pages will not print are the pages with the errors.

2. You can also try copying the items on the page and placing them in a fresh document. Choose Select All from the EDIT menu, then go to the new document and paste the items into it. Be sure to set up your margins again.

3. Now, you want to look at the problem pages. The first action is to save the file under a different name and make sure that the original is closed. Remove the images and resave the file as filename-no-images. Try to print it. If it prints, the problem is in one of your images. If it still doesn’t print, open the copy with both text and images and remove the text. If it prints, the text is probably the culprit. You probably have a corrupt font somewhere. Try changing the font to something similar and printing. If the font change works, the original font is to blame.

If the file will not print with the text removed, start removing images. Remove half, and try to print. If it prints, start replacing the images one by one until the file no longer prints. In this way, you can isolate the problem image and replace it with a fresh copy from a back-up disk. If none of this works, there are still options.

1. Try printing to a different printer (if in the labs, choose the opposite lab printer than the one currently selected).

2. Try printing from a different computer.

3. Try trashing the preferences folder in the System Folder.

4. Try printing a recent version of the file. If it works, start retracing your steps to see where the problem possibly occurred.

This isn’t an exact science or process, but these actions can help you save work that might otherwise have been lost, and make you look like a genius!

Jennifer Nieland is the lab coordinator for the College of the Design student computer labs.