PDF XChange Forum

Hello,

Our staff print plans and design drawings and require them to be printed to specific scale. We used to be able to select the appropriate pinter and paper size, then check Select Paper Size by Document's Page Size and this would just work but now appears to not work.

When the aformentioned setting is checked the document does not print, it shows in the printers queue and the file size keeps growing and growing. The progress bar in PDF-X stays at 0% and the app needs to be closed via task manager.

Without the option selected only a corner of the image is printed.

I can print the same documents from Sumatra PDF by selecting the appropriate printer and page size and this works correctly. This PDF viewer appears to use the direct Windows print function so I'm suspecting there's something within PDF-X I'm missing.

The computers I have seen these results on have been upgraded from Win7 to Win10. On a clean Win10 this issue does not occur, the document prints correctly. Both categories of computers are subject to the same group policies. Printer drivers have been removed and reinstalled with restarts in between.

Thanks

Hello IT Guy,

If the issue is only present on machines that have undergone the Windows update process from W7 to W10, the issue most certainly lies in some system files that we need which are not present or have moved due to the update. If you have not already, ensure that all windows updates are installed, and then try fully reinstalling the Editor. If that does not resolve the issue, you will likely need to reinstall windows 10 as a fresh installation on those machines to resolve this issue.

Kind regards,

Thanks Daniel, but really? That's the best we can do here? We paid good money for this product, you're going to have to try a bit harder than that.

It's a whooooooole bunch cheaper and easier for me to find a new PDF product than reinstall 100+ workstations. I can't be the only IT guy who has just gone through a Windows 10 upgrade roll-out. You don't have any comment/experience/testing with your product in this environment?

Can you please send us screenshot of your Editor's print dialog with selected printer and desired options set (even if it 'hangs' you can make a screenshot), and exact printer model and used driver?

Hi IT guy,

you make a good point about the work involved in 100+ re-installations. I suspect Daniel imagined this might only be a few machines. So, yes, lets look into the case and see what we can come up with.

You don't have any comment/experience/testing with your product in this environment?

To date you are the first to have reported this, so we have no data to go on here. Our testing is done in a virtual environment on a range of operating systems, however those are typically clean installs, not upgrades from an older OS.

Ivan has asked for some screen shots. We will do what we can to determine what is happening here.

regards

Paul

Thanks Team, I appreciate the help. Please excuse the redaction in the screenshots provided.

The printers we are using are: 3 x ApeosPort-V C4476 and 1 x C2276. These were installed by Fuji Xerox a few years ago. The drivers described by Print management (Windows Server 2012 R2 x64) are: FX ApeosPort-V C4476 and C2276 PS version 6.9.1.1.

The way they have been installed is, each print option has been given it's own driver and the end user sees them like this: Traditionally the process has been to use the settings as shown here: The resulting jobs in the print queue show as: On a workstation where it's not working, the top job in the queue will spool very very slowly. We've managed to wait 30 mins and it has grown to ~170mb with this specific file and no resulting print. We have 4 of these printers in the building and it's the same result on each. The same setting as shown here with the same document print according to our requirements on my workstation which was a Win10 fresh install.

The clean install factor may be a red-hearing, it's just a difference I noticed. I'm working to get some more data on this.

Can you please check that absolutely the same printer drivers version in both cases when it works and not?
I suspect that the Postscript driver might be the issue.
The Editor prints using Windows GDI API, and in case of transparent or masked images there might be an issue with Postscript drivers, and not all of them support transparent images.

I can confirm printing to the same printer from my workstation uses the same driver. The user has also tested sending to different printers around the office with the same result. I'm able to print successfully to them all.

Is there any logging I can look to or turn on?

The event log shows the following: I suspect this is after the fact though. The user has since restarted their computer and the files have been cleared (or didn't exist to start with). I'll try and recreate and grab this info

Ivan - Tracker Software wrote: ↑Tue Feb 04, 2020 11:53 pm in case of transparent or masked images there might be an issue with Postscript drivers, and not all of them support transparent images.

If you think it's worth the effort I can experiment with different files. So far I've only been trying with technical drawings that have been generated with 12d Model and AutoCAD etc into PDF format.

Can you send us any of these documents you have the problem with? Or at least one problematic page.
You can use my email to send a document.

Check into your system that you have installed the same driver or not because if your printer supports another driver and you install the other one then there is an issue. I also made the same mistake once with my Epson printer. I installed the wrong driver and after this, my Epson printer shows an error and it shows a message "epson printer in error state" and I solved it by installing the right drivers.

Hello Marry,

Thanks for your post, but the discussion above is not about Epson devices, and you have in your first post ever in our forums shared a link to a suspicious website. If we see more such unsolicited posts we might need to disable your account.

Regards,
Stefan

Can you send us any of these documents you have the problem with? Or at least one problematic page.
You can use my email to send a document.

Sorry but unfortunately not. The documents contain sensitive information that I can't share. We could look at getting an NDA to you but I can print the document on some workstation with expected results and not others so I don't think it's worth pursuing this avenue just yet.

Apologies for the delays in response, I'm pretty snowed under over here. I've managed a sum total of zero hours on this issue since my last post, but it's still on my radar to investigate further.

Hello IT Guy,

I am sorry to hear that. If the issue can still be reproduced after redacting the sensitive information, would you be able to share it then? Regardless, we are in no rush if you are preoccupied, please let us know whenever you have time to look into this further.

If you can remove the "critically sensitive" information from the document, we can ensure that the files are secure internally and only our support and development teams will look at them if you email us directly <support@pdf-xchange.com> with the files and a link to this thread. Any files we work with will be deleted from all of our devices upon resolution of the issue, at your request.

Kind regards,