Ms office documents printing gibberish

Question

hello i have successfully set up a print server using cups.  but whenever i try to print ms office documents (via mac) it just prints out gibberish.  i have set up my mime.convs and mime.types in /etc/cups but it still doesn't work.
anyone else have similar problems?

Answer 1

This is a problem with Microsoft office documents that's been going on for years. If you Google around enough, you'll find people complaining about it going back to Office 2004. I've been looking into it for a couple of years for a client who uses Leopard and office 2004. Possible solutions include: creating an invisible folder at the root level of the SharePoint called “TemporaryItems” and using Terminal to give it the proper permissions; changing all of the numeric user IDs away from 501 and 502 and using very large unique numbers instead; and changing the owner of the share point on the server to something called NETWORK SERVICE (it's unclear to me if this will work on a Mac server or only Windows).
I have applied the TemporaryItems folder solution, and it did solve the problem for a number of months. But it just came back with a vengeance. So here I am, googling around again. I can tell you this problem occurs, with some variations, in versions of Office from 2004 through 2011, and Mac operating systems from Tiger through Snow Leopard. It's rather mind-boggling that this has never been dealt with.
Here are some links for your perusing pleasure:
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20051122213207398
http://word.mvps.org/mac/cantsavetoserver.html
http://hintsforums.macworld.com/archive/index.php/t-12077.html
You can find lots and lots of people online complaining about this. Just spend some time searching. In my case, my clients are only using two computers, one of which is using native filesharing, so it's not even a full-on server situation.
Message was edited by: cavenewt