My Last Straw

I've had it with Adobe Acrobat Reader 7.0. Whenever I encounter a .pdf file that has both graphics and text on it, I can't seem to print it. No matter what I try to do, I just can't print the whole thing.

I recently upgraded to Acrobat Reader 7.0 on all my machines. My wife's computer is a W2K box that has the Brother HL-1440 printer attached to it. My laptop runs XP and I can normally print to the Brother with no problems over the network. My main box is a RH9 box that also prints to the same printer via the network.

I received an invoice from MySQL AB for the training I attended last week. I viewed it fine with Acrobat Reader 7.0 and then clicked "Print". Only the logos and lines on the document came out. So I tried a couple of the different "Comments and Forms" options in the Print dialog. Same thing. I figured my printer drivers might be out of date, so I updated them and tried again. Boxes and graphics only. Then I un-installed and re-installed Reader 7.0 with the most current updates. Same thing.

Next, I brought the document up on my laptop which also has Acrobat Reader 7.0 and tried printing to the network printer. Same deal. Then I tried printing the same file from my Linux box with Reader 7.0 with exactly the same result. Just for kicks, I brought up the file in xpdf and printed it, and voila, it prints fine. That ruled out the printer.

I thought maybe it was just the document I was trying to print. So I created a document with lines, graphics and text in Open Office and saved it as a .pdf. I tried it on all three computers; Reader 7.0 couldn't print, xpdf could.

Maybe it is the printer after all. I brought the same two documents to work and tried to print on an HP 8150. Still only those damn boxes and lines. Then I figured I'll downgrade to Reader 6, but I couldn't find it on Adobe's site.

My next step is seeing if there is a xpdf version for Windows.