I thought the problem was just with my Brother printer, but it just happened with my newish Lexmark, both laser printers: I have a series of jobs or one ginormous print job going, and it starts out fine, but somewhere along the road it suddenly goes from what I’m expecting to weird lines of symbols on 1-5 lines.
Is this a memory overload problem?
I just have to clear the jobs and start over and it’s fine. But I’m wondering if I increased the memory if I’d stop having the problem.
This could be a comms problem - how are the printers hooked to a computer? Otherwise, it may be a memory issue, but it could also be a job control problem. HP printers used to do this all the time, a job in PCL or postcript could be mis-interpreted as a text job, resulting in screeds of printed paper with a few lines of odd characters on each page.
Si
I’ve had this happen when printing a PDF. The reason is that there is a font in the PDF that the printer doesn’t have and the printer guesses poorly at a substitute internal font. The fix is in the printer driver properties: change the setting that says “substitute printer font” to “download truetype font” or “print fonts as graphics.”
The only times it has happened to me there was a printer driver issue. This is with a Brother laser printer as well. Like you, I only had problems with certain print jobs and often the problem showed up partway through, producing hundreds of pages with either some kind of error message or gibberish.
In one instance, Mac OS was using an older manufacturer’s driver; all I had to do was specify the newer CUPS driver that comes with the OS. (I say “all I had to do,” but I spent forever figuring that one out). In this case, the printing error only showed up when I printed from Acrobat, but other applications did just fine.
In the other case, my tax prep software was specifying a generic HP driver and I had to make sure it knew about the Brother driver.