Printing a PDF document using a PDF print driver

#1

This post is in response to another thread posting.

RussellHltn wrote:
jdlessley wrote:Printing a PDF document using a PDF print driver results in a blank document.
It shouldn't.

Please explain. What am I missing? I have never been able to get a PDF document to print using a PDF print driver. I have always gotten a blank document on every machine and every PDF print driver (DocuCom PDF Driver, CutePDF Writer, PaperPort PDF, Progeny PDF Printer) I have tried. I can only get PDF documents to print to hardware printers or to other format print drivers.

russellhltn · #2

I don't know why you're experiencing that. In my mind, if you're printing, you're printing. The driver in use shouldn't make a difference like that.

The machine I'm sitting at right now as Adobe Pro, Adobe Reader and the Adobe Print driver.

Just now, I opened a form in Adobe Reader, filled in a few lines, printed it using the Adobe Printer and it came out just fine.

What reader are you using? What print settings are you using? The only thing I can think of is that it's a printer setting in the reader's print dialog connected with those drivers.

#3

RussellHltn wrote:I don't know why you're experiencing that. In my mind, if you're printing, you're printing. The driver in use shouldn't make a difference like that.

The machine I'm sitting at right now as Adobe Pro, Adobe Reader and the Adobe Print driver.

Just now, I opened a form in Adobe Reader, filled in a few lines, printed it using the Adobe Printer and it came out just fine.

What reader are you using? What print settings are you using? The only thing I can think of is that it's a printer setting in the reader's print dialog connected with those drivers.

I'm using Adobe Acrobat Reader (Adobe Reader), the free PDF viewer. No other Acrobat software is on the computer.

For printing I do this: With a PDF document open using Adobe Reader I select File > Print. Then in the Print dialogue I select a PDF driver such as "PaperPort PDF" from the Printer Name dropdown listbox. In "Comments and Forms" section of the Printer group I select "Document and Markups". All other options are the defaults. When I click OK I get a "Save As" dialog pop-up as expected to select the file location and name. The save as type only has the options of PDF and "All Files" as expected with PDF as the default. There are not other options or settings I can find that will affect the success of the print.

The PDF print drivers such as CutePDF Writer, PaperPort PDF and others are really converters that convert a file into a PDF document. I surmise that the converter does not see anything to convert since the document is already in PDF format and therefore returns a blank document.

I have no problems printing (or converting to PDF) any other file types using the PDF printer drivers (converters). It is just with PDF documents themselves.

russellhltn · #4

Do you have a specific form I can test with?

#5

Here's the PLA form in English:

English PLA Request Form Mar 2010.pdf: (555.4 KiB) Downloaded 1081 times

#6

RussellHltn wrote:I don't know why you're experiencing that. In my mind, if you're printing, you're printing. The driver in use shouldn't make a difference like that.
....
Just now, I opened a form in Adobe Reader, filled in a few lines, printed it using the Adobe Printer and it came out just fine.

When you said that you "printed it using Adobe Printer and it came out just fine" did you mean there was a print job run through your printer that produced a paper product? If so there is some misunderstanding as to what is trying to be accomplished.

When a PDF print driver is being used there is no printing going on. It is really a file conversion utility that uses the print interface to perform its function. The PDF print driver (PDF file conversion utility) does not produce a print to paper product like a standard hardware printer does. Its output is a file converted from some other format to a PDF format.

aebrown · #7

jdlessley wrote:The PDF print drivers such as CutePDF Writer, PaperPort PDF and others are really converters that convert a file into a PDF document.

That's not really true. If they were really converters, they would have some knowledge of all possible source file formats, but of course, they don't. Instead, they take the information the printing application sends to the print driver and convert it to PDF format.

jdlessley wrote: I surmise that the converter does not see anything to convert since the document is already in PDF format and therefore returns a blank document.

The PDF print driver has no knowledge of the format of the source file, since the file itself is never sent to the print driver. So that theory can't possibly explain why the blank document is returned on your system.

jdlessley wrote:I have no problems printing (or converting to PDF) any other file types using the PDF printer drivers (converters). It is just with PDF documents themselves.

And yet I can print any PDF document, including the sample PLA document you attached to another post, with every PDF printer I have ever tried, including CutePDF and PDF Creator. I have not tried your "PaperPort PDF" print driver; perhaps the problem lies with that particular print driver. Have you tried a different print driver? If another print driver fails on your system, then there must be something odd about your system. There is certainly no fundamental restriction on printing PDF files using a PDF print driver -- I do it all the time.

#8

aebrown wrote:And yet I can print any PDF document, including the sample PLA document you attached to another post, with every PDF printer I have ever tried, including CutePDF and PDF Creator. I have not tried your "PaperPort PDF" print driver; perhaps the problem lies with that particular print driver. Have you tried a different print driver? If another print driver fails on your system, then there must be something odd about your system. There is certainly no fundamental restriction on printing PDF files using a PDF print driver -- I do it all the time.

I only used the PaperPort PDF as an example of all the PDF print drivers I have used. I listed some others my opening post. As I recall the very same thing happened on Church computers in two different wards that I tried this.

In testing some other PDF print drivers I did get one that instead of returning a blank document displayed an error message that said "The file being printed is already in PDF format. The print conversion will stop.". This supports what I suspected.

russellhltn · #9

jdlessley wrote:Here's the PLA form in English:

Here it is filled out and "printed".

Melchizedek Priesthood Line of Authority Request.pdf: (44.47 KiB) Downloaded 1414 times

jdlessley wrote:In testing some other PDF print drivers I did get one that instead of returning a blank document displayed an error message that said "The file being printed is already in PDF format. The print conversion will stop.". This supports what I suspected.

Strangers and stranger. It sounds like it's not really printing but somehow exporting or converting.

Edit: You didn't check the "Print to file" box did you? It's counter intuntive, but you don't want the program to know it's printing to a file.

harddrive · #10

jdlessley wrote:This post is in response to another thread posting.

Please explain. What am I missing? I have never been able to get a PDF document to print using a PDF print driver. I have always gotten a blank document on every machine and every PDF print driver (DocuCom PDF Driver, CutePDF Writer, PaperPort PDF, Progeny PDF Printer) I have tried. I can only get PDF documents to print to hardware printers or to other format print drivers.

My first question is why are you trying to save a PDF file as a PDF file? CutePDF Writer takes the printed output and saves it as a PDF file.

Now if you are filling out a PDF form and I know that you can't save it as a PDF file, then when you try to print, the application or something is saying that this form can't be saved, even if I print it to a PDF file.

Have you tried taking a document or a report from MLS and print it to a PDF file? If so has that worked? If so, then it really sounds like Adobe is not letting the file be saved even though you are printing to a file.

Hope this helps.