Printing problems - Acrobat files

The exam pages were scanned from paper copies, and these are mostly graphic images. As such, they require a printer with a fairly large amount of memory. If you try to print the exam files using a typical home printer, you may not have enough memory, or enough free disk space. If the files appear "backwards" when they are printed out, this is a symptom of insufficient memory. 

I assume that you have access to “high speed” printers at work. This would allow you to print the exams successfully. You may have to try one or more printers, or use different printer drivers. 

The general rule is that you should use the Postscript printer driver to print Acrobat files. I recently purchased a new printer, and a few pages would be completely blank. After calling HP, they told me NOT to use the PCL driver. That solved my problem for that printer. 

But this does not always give the best results - it may be a hardware problem, or it may be a software problem. I have an older printer where I get better results using the PCL driver. You'll have to experiment to see what works best for you. 

Another thing you can try is using different computers. I have multiple computers with different versions of Windows installed. I could not print the exams to an HP LaserJet 5L printer using Windows 98 on my old laptop. The pages literally printed out as mirror images, as described above. However, using my new laptop and Windows XP, I was surprised that I could print the files to the HP LaserJet 5L printer. This is probably due to some obscure setting that I changed in the printer driver properties.

If you still have problems printing the PDF files, try getting the latest version of the Acrobat Reader from the Adobe website.

Last modified: February 22, 2012