PDF not printing correctly and how to fix each symptom

Printing is where problems that were invisible on screen become expensive in paper. A screen scales a page to fit the window and forgives a great deal. A printer has a fixed sheet, a physical margin it cannot print into, and no ability to reflow anything.

The phrase pdf wont print covers two different complaints. One is a document that prints and comes out wrong, which is everything below. The other is a job that never reaches the printer at all. That is almost always the spooler or the driver rather than the file. Send any other document to the same printer before blaming the PDF.

Everything is small with wide margins

The commonest complaint, and almost always the fit-to-page setting. Most print dialogs default to shrinking content slightly so nothing is lost to the printer's unprintable edge.

The cost is a document printed a few percent smaller than it should be. It sits in the middle of the sheet with more white space than it should have. On a text document nobody notices. On a form, a scale drawing or anything that has to match a physical original, it matters.

Content is cut off at the edges

This is a size mismatch. A document laid out for US Letter printed on A4, or the reverse, loses content because the sheets are different shapes.

Fit to page solves it at the cost of scaling, which is the right trade for most documents. When exact size matters, the document needs re-laying out for the paper you have rather than being squeezed onto it.

Sometimes the file itself has to match the paper, for a print shop or an upload portal. PDFslime's Resize PDF puts every page on one sheet size with the content scaled to fit. Files that mix sizes after a merge are covered in PDF has mixed page sizes.

Pages print sideways

Either the print dialog is set to the wrong orientation, or the document mixes portrait and landscape pages. In the second case the dialog applies one setting to all of them.

Mixed orientation is common in reports where a wide table is rotated to landscape among portrait pages. Most print dialogs offer an automatic option that follows each page's own orientation, and choosing it resolves this without splitting the document.

Extra blank sheets

Usually blank pages that are in the file, most often from duplex scanning or from trailing empty paragraphs in whatever generated the document. The printer is faithfully reproducing pages that exist. Organize PDF shows every page as a thumbnail, so the blank ones stand out and can be deleted before the next print.

Occasionally it is a separator page added by the printer driver or a print server. That is a driver setting, not anything in the document. Checking the page count in the reader against the sheets produced tells you which.

Wrong characters or substituted fonts

Text that prints in a different typeface, or with boxes and question marks where characters should be, has one usual cause. The font is not embedded in the file, and the printer does not have it.

Screen and printer can disagree here, because your computer may have the font while the printer does not. A document that previews perfectly can still print wrong for this reason. Network printers that render the document themselves, rather than receiving a rasterised image, are the usual place it happens.

Print as image

When the cause is unclear or nothing has worked, this setting resolves most remaining cases. It tells the reader to rasterise each page on your machine and send the printer a picture rather than a set of drawing instructions.