Printing gibberish

I have an HP PhotoSmart Plus B210 Printer and an HP Officejet Pro 6830. Both printers are printing "gibberish". It may print 1/2 page of what I want to print, but then it prints a bunch of random letters or symbols or black lines all over the page. Then it continually prints a few random symbols and uses a new sheet. Both printers have wasted so much paper and ink!! I'm using Windows 7. Please help.

Hi puzzled48,
Welcome to the HP Forums.
I see that you are having an issue with garbled text on your print jobs.
Please click on the following link that deals with Continuous Pages of Strange or Garbled Characters Print in Windows.
Let me know how you make out.
Cheers,
Click the “Kudos Thumbs Up" at the bottom of this post to say “Thanks” for helping!
Please click “Accept as Solution ” if you feel my post solved your issue, it will help others find the solution.
W a t e r b o y 71
I work on behalf of HP

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HP LaserJet 4300 prints gibberish for one user, but prints OK for all others on a Windows 7 32-bit

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This question was solved.
View Solution.

Hi MDOTd5-247,
The product you have is a commercial printer. I suggest posting in the forum for HP Business Support for a better chance at finding a solution.
Here is the link to the Commercial Laserjet board:
http://h30499.www3.hp.com/t5/Printers-LaserJet/bd-p/bsc-413
If I have helped in any way, just click the Kudos star on the left. Also, if your issue has been resolved, don't forget to select Accept as Solution

Prints gibberish in headers and footers in emails or web pages.

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Welcome to the HP Community , I read through your post about the printing issues you have been having, and I hope to help you! Seeing how the printer will make copies and test print tells us that the printer itself is fine and there is no hardware issues. However, seeing how printing from two different computers will not work, flags a software problem on the computers. Please try out the steps below and get back to me with the results and we will go from there. If you did not install the Full Driver, run the HP Printer Install Wizard for Windows to search and install the complete driver and software. This will need to run on both computers individually. Manually restart the print spoolers on the computers:1. Click Start
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Network Printer printing Gibberish and Disconnecting

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My L7680 intermitently prints gibberish part way through pdf documents.

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I'm running Windows XP and I access the printer through a BT HomeHub wireless. I've tried reinstalling the drivers, resetting the HomeHub and running the HP Diagnostic software with no joy (the latter found no problems). The problem does not seem to occur when printing Word documents.
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There have been reports of Vista not working well with older networking equipment. Here's a link to a Microsoft note on this subject.
I also have a couple of other questions:
When the printer stalls, can you ping the printer from the PC? Can you access the printer's internal web page by browsing its IP address?
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Regards / Jim B
Regards / Jim B / Wireless Enthusiasts
( While I'm an embedded wireless systems engineer at work, on this forum I do not represent my former employer, Hewlett-Packard, or my current employer, Microsoft )
+ Click the White Kudos star on the left as a way to say "thank you" for helpful posts.

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Message Edited by ubu560 on 11-19-2009 09:35 AM

Updated the printer firmware and it didn't help.Is there any thing that can be done from outlook side
Hi,
We don't know if it's an issue on Outlook client side, we need more information to narrow down the issue.
So this only occurs in Outlook? Does this happpen to all emails? You have mentioned that this is an enterprise environment, so how many clients are affected by this?
First try to check for updates and install any required ones (It’s always a good idea to keep current with updates.), then check result.
Please keep us posted with any updates.
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Just go to this link:
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Hi Rob, and a warm welcome to the forums!
Yes that is Postscript, and the printer isn't liking it, I'd delete that one in Printer Setup Utility & try adding a new hp non-Postscript one.
Might try these two also...
Mac OS X: About the Reset Printing System feature ...
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1341?viewlocale=en_US
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Have you moved the paper guides to properly align the envelopes? I do not see how envelopes can be loaded in any position but the center with the paper guides set snugly. See page 42 (46) of the manual here. Also, if you have the optional second paper tray note that envelopes are not supported in it, you need to use the top tray.
Bob Headrick, HP Expert
I am not an employee of HP, I am a volunteer posting here on my own time.
If your problem is solved please click the "Accept as Solution" button ------------V
If my answer was helpful please click the "Thumbs Up" to say "Thank You"--V

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I recently purchased a new computer with Windows 8. My Officejet Pro L7580 worked fine in a previous version of Windows, but it is now almost useless. I have upgraded to Windows 8.1 and installed the printer software from the HP website half a dozen times.
The printer will print the first half of the first page of a document just fine. It then cuts off and spits out pages with one line of gibberish at the top. It is doing this even for the test page. When I open the print queue, the document is listed as printing page 4/1.
Can someone help me? This is driving me nuts.

I had the exact same problem as described in the above posts with my existing L7850 printer on my new windows 8.1 computer. Did reintalls and that didn't help. However when I used the installed hp support center to attempt to fix the problem it suggested that since this priinter had the the older composite USB port that it may cause this issue if you connected it to a USB 3.0 port instead of a USB 2.0 port . So I connected it to a USB 2.0 port of my computer instead and that fixed the problem. Prints just fine now. Hopefully this helps anyone else with the same issue.

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John DeYulia

That's a guaranteed sign of a conflict between the Print Driver for your Printer and the Version of Acrobat you have.
First upgrade to the very latest version of Acrobat you can for the version you have.
Then go to to Printer website and the the very latest Driver they have.
I'll will almost bet a wooden nickel that you have a Hewlett-Packard Printer.
Adobe and Hewlett-Packard have had a known for years love/hate, yin/yang relationship. Every time Adobe would make a small change to Acrobat code. It would bust HP's Print Driver code. Usually it showed up as diagonal lines from one corner to the other. The only work around is Print as image. (looks like an old time TV that has the Horizontal hold out of adjustment.) as of Lat through Acrobat 8 and 9 they've buried the hatchet apparently.

Connecting to Printer via Bluetooth, documents print gibberish

Howdy,
I have a Canon Pixma iP100 and have recently installed the bluetooth accessory so that I could print wirelessly from my computer and iPhone via bluetooth. However, it won't work! I have sent documents to the printer from my computer and the documents come out in gibberish. Varying about 10 - 20 lines per page, it's become a real waste of paper and is getting to be really frustrating. Once it starts to print a document, it continuously spits out these pages of gibberish until the paper runs out as if there is no 'last page.' It does however print photos.
I also am unable to connect my iPhone to the printer. It will not recognize that the printer is available to connect so therefore won't print anything (documents or photos). Any ideas?
I've followed the Bluetooth Guide that came with the Canon Setup Utility and have set up the bluetooth preferences within it.
I have a Macbook Pro (OS X 10.5.8) and an iPhone 3Gs (4.2.1)
Thank you for your help!

Hi again:
Since the printer works when cable connected, it appears that he BT connection is the problem (not exactly a startling revelation! ).
You probably have already done so, but my next step would be to contact Canon (tech support) to see if there is a software update and/or a workaround. I am jumping to conclusions, but I suspect the Canon software is not playing well with your Mac.
Barry
P.S. There is no OS X setting that I am aware of that would cause what you describe. However, you could trash a preference file (com.apple.bluetooth.plist) and restart. It would also not hurt to reset the SMC.

Reader 9 prints gibberish

I currently have Reader 9 and have encountered an unusual problem I've never seen before with any Reader version.
When I view some of my pdf files on the screen, they look just fine. But when I go to print them out, all I get is gibberish. It's basic formatting is the same...keeps paragraph structure and so on...but the text is like nothing I've ever seen before. The page numbers come out wrong, too.
Only some files do this. They seem to be files that I got from the same source but unfortunately, I'm having no luck contacting the people who put out those files even though they are a seemingly reputable bunch...probably on a month long silent meditation. (it's a buddhist website)
I'm using a Canon ip4700 and have already talked to them about it and they have discounted this as a printer problem.
What I don't get is how come it shows up perfectly readable on screen but not on paper.
Anyone out there ever encounter this and might be able to clue me in on what is causing the problem...and better still...how to fix it?
Thanks

Workaround:
This is an old workaround I found searching the very same subject and tried it this morning with success!
After selecting File>Print, near the bottom of the window is an "Advanced" button. click on this. You will find an option to "Print as Image". This will allow you to print the PDF exactly as you see it instead of it trying to print the individual lines of text. An image is an image.
As to the origin of this problem, I do not believe the origination of the document is at fault. In our office we have over 15 users. We can have some print the EXACT same PDF without any problems, while other users/computers print the gibberish. All systems have the same programs and updates (to the best of my knowledge) and we have the same printers.
I am sure there is some obscure Windows update that one system may have that the other do not, hard to say without a lot of time to investigate.
Let us know if this works for you!

Ms office documents printing gibberish

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?

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

Printing gibberish

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