Printers are usually fairly reliable peripherals, causing less problems than most, probably because they are almost never connected by SCSI. Nonetheless, they have their fair share of problems too.
irst up. Do you have a Duo 230? If you do, you may find that outside a Duo Dock, you cannot print or register with printers if you have any extensions on. This is hardware oriented and seems to be Duo 230 specific. Blame Apple, shout and scream, then go and find someone to take a look inside for you...
few things to try. If you are using QuickDraw GX, try with a normal printer driver, first. Next, try reinstalling your printer driver software that came with your printer. Finally, check all the leads are in correctly. If none of these work, then read on!
f it is a freeze, the first thing you should do is to check the cables to the printer and the printer's power supply.
Next, check that the application you are using to print the package has enough RAM pumped into it (I usually choose 500k to 1MB more than it needs and I've only got 8MB in total anyway, so most people should be able to manage that.)
Finally, in the short list, make sure that if background printing is on, you either try with it off (Changeable in your Chooser), or with nothing else open or printing. Sometimes, background printing can crash a computer if it gets and error and the gets swamped by pages all wanting to be printed out at once. There must be an error in the code somewhere so you can blame Apple for that.
ailing that, the most likely cause of a freeze is due to an extension conflict, usually with the printer driver and another extension (this happens quite a lot with some networking extensions e.g. FileWave). Try turning off all your extensions except the printer ones and retrying. If you are not sure how to do this, or you want more help on what extension conflicts are, click here.
last resort here, if none of the above works, is to get someone qualified to open it up for you and take a look inside. There could be something jamming the rollers (though this is usually quite obvious and will normally result in a time-out error), or something has simply gone wrong in the circuits.
Remember, opening hardware up yourself is almost the best way of ruining your warranty.
ext up is the error message. Without one, you are really stuck, except to check for extension conflicts (quite likely, so see above's link if you are not sure what these are about). If an extension conflict is not the case, you should get someone who knows a lot about printers to help open it up.
hat is usually wrong is that you have let the printer get too hot (from being on too long or because it does not ventilate the heat efficiently). If you let it cool down for a while, things should return to normal. The same remedy will work if the engine has simply got out of sync with the paper flow.
ther reasons for this unexpected behaviour are more than lightly to be hardware oriented, so the best course of action is to get in touch with someone who can take a look inside safely.
nsted of rushing out to contact someone. Try waiting half a minute and then printing again, everything should be alright. For some reason some programs are insistent that your printer is bust if it is of a certain type. An example of this is Microsoft Word 5. The first time you try to print something out the message comes, but every other time until you try again the next day for the first time, works fine.
N.B. If you want to be sure, you can still contact someone to take a look but do not open the printer yourself...
f you are trying to print to both sides of the paper, then it is advisable to print out all the odd pages, then all the evens so that you do not have to keep taking paper from the outlet back to the inlet for the second side. Alternatively, simply, get it to print out one extra copy of each page you expect to get the error on. If you are printing to single sides of the paper, the solution is simply to make sure enough paper is in the feeding cassette or tray before you start.
eturns are the easiest. Some programs, again like Word 5 do not check (I do not know whether this problem has been corrected in Word 6), to make sure character returns are saved correctly on the document. If you view the special character returns it the bad ones look ok... Printing shows the problem up as you will get the horrible areas where two character rows have been printed on top of each other making, in short, a mess. Printing is also unfortunately the only way to verify that everything is alright so make sure you have plenty of rough paper around.
imply check to see where the bad returns are by comparing the print out to the copy on your screen. Then delete the carriage returns and put new ones in, this should solve the problem. If it does not, make sure that nothing has been framed and put into a special are over another block of text. (You can check this in the Print/Page Preview areas of the word processor, depending on which you have.
onts are also easy to deal with. Simply make sure that the correct fonts are present in your fonts folder and that the printer understands them. Your printer software disks should have a way to download new fonts to the printer, and failing that, you can always (gasp) consult the manual about it. If neither of these work and re-installing the fonts/printer drivers fail, then the problem is going to hardware oriented.
Is you printer PostScript? Some programs, like QuarkXPress do not like non-PostScript printers, and will react badly if asked to print with one. This includes fonts looking wrong, margins all over the place and the general mayhem you would expect to find if you had asked a two year old to draw it for you. The best option is to either get a PostScript printer or to try and find a new DTP package that will drive QuickDraw printers.
f the fonts appear to be have been roughened, then make sure that you have the right types of font in the font folder. The two main types are TrueType and PostScript. The former will work nicely in all sizes and styles, while the latter will only work in certain sizes and styles. If you get the wrong ones, the computer makes a (supposedly) educated guess at what they should look like and does not give very good results.
dobe Type Manage (or ATM) is a control panel that will make a much better job of this process (if you do not mind sacrificing between 400k and 1MB of RAM for it depending on the version and how good a job you want it to do). It comes with most systems now (from 7.5 onwards) so it may be worth upgrading to take advantage of it if you are a 7.1 user. (It costs a fair bit for what it does if bought separately). The program can also be found with most Adobe software packages these days.
argins are not a common problem but have three possible sources. One, of course, is the hardware, which has to be assumed if it is not either of the other two. the second is that you mat have changed printers while a file was open which could lead to bad margins. Try quitting the application and re-loading (Save First!).
o luck? The last reason is that the margins may be set wrong in the application anyway. Try creating a new document in the application and checking the margin values against those in the old one. If they are different, restore the old ones to the new one's values. The other area is that if you have QuickDraw GX installed, and the Paper Type Editor in use, this can sometimes over-ride an application's standard margins and impose the ones you programmed it with on it. You will have to find the active margin file and edit it to show the correct ones you want.
