I’ve created a one-page (legal size) Word document that is driving me bonkers. My printer will be only partially through “digesting” (layman’s term for the gradual process by which my old workhorse printer accepts in the signal from my PC) the document content before it spits out an incomplete printed page. Large chunks of text will be missing from the page. The printer will follow up the garbled page with a warning that the printer had insufficient memory to handle the whole doc.
Now granted, I’ve got an ancient b/w LaserWriter II with only 2mb of memory, but it can still output other much, much larger documents like a charm (albeit with a bit of waiting) so I’m pretty sure it’s not the printer or driver. I’ve tried various tricks like changing/reducing fonts and eliminating a text box here or a picture there – all with limited and never entirely satisfactory results.
Any ideas for solving this? Thanks all.
(I have an intuition that one of the elements – a font, text box, picture or format instruction – is “corrupted” somehow. Do such things happen? If so, I assume the solution lies in simply rebuilding the doc from scratch. If that’s the case, is there a way to spare myself the work of having to re-keyboard every letter? I don’t mind the reformatting, it’s the typing I hate. Can I c&p the existing text to a blank doc, convert it to ASCI (or some other elemental form), then c&p it to my new doc and reformat it?)
Picture seems to be the key here. A picture can suck up a lot of memory. Did you much larger documents also contain similar pictures? The document is transmitted to the printer a chunk at a time, so you can print a zillion page doc on a printer with small memory. But I’ll bet a graphic has to be trasmitted all in one piece. I’m not sure; technically, it wouldn’t really have to be, but I have seen this problem on older laser printers and they run out of memory on a page with a large graphic.
None of this helps you with your problem. I wonder if you can print the page in overlays somehow–run the same sheet through twice. But that’s a huge pain.
Is your printer memory upgradeable?
Elements can certainly get corrupted but I’ll bet that’s not your problem. Make another Word file. Copy the largest graphic and paste it into the new document and try to print it. If it works keep building up the new document by copying graphics from the old one. Then bring in all the text (least likely to be your problem). When you get to the point of failure, back out the last change that pushed you over the edge, and then continue with the other elements. If you can’t bring in another element, no matter what it is, then you are just out of memory. Otherwise it was the element you skipped that is somehow causing the problem. This might help you diagnose it but still won’t make it work. But you might have a chance at figuring out the sticking point.
You can always take your file to Kinko’s to print it as a last resort.
Well, here’s an idea, based on a similar problem I encountered once:
A woman was trying to print party invitations on a very old LaserWriter, and encountered a problem very similar to what you describe. I looked at the point at which the text screwed up on the page, and noted that it happened at the date. Now, if you’ve worked with Word much, you know that by default it changes the “th” in dates like “17th” to superscript automatically. For some reason, the old LaserWriter was choking on that; I guess superscript wasn’t something they planned for back when they built it. I changed the superscript “th” to a regular “th”, and it printed fine.
If you’re wondering how I did that, here’s my shortcut way to change the superscript without going into any settings: type the date, but leave out the middle character (for “17th”, type “17h”), followed by a space. Hit the left arrow to go back and add the middle character. Right-arrow back out, and the text will remain normal and not superscript itself.
Look at the point at which the problem occurs. I bet there’s something similar going on.