Printing a PDF results in garbled text (sometimes)

Posted by Scott Whitlock on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Scott Whitlock
Published on 2011-08-11T20:47:38Z Indexed on 2013/06/28 16:25 UTC
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We have a system that renders a report as a PDF, and displays it in the browser for the user. In the browser, the document always appears to display fine, but when printed on one machine, it sometimes changes some of the data in the report to seemingly random characters.

Here are some examples of the strings it inserts:

Ebuf;
Bvhvt ul1: -!3122
Ti jqqf e!Wjb;
Nfttf ohf s!Tf swjdf

Additionally, the inter-character spacing is weird. It sometimes writes characters overlapping each other.

I noticed some repetition in the garbled text, so I typed a few of them into Google, and surprisingly got a lot of hits. Here is the string I searched for: pdf cjmp ebuf nftf up!

The Google search summaries contain the garbled text. However, when I click on those links in Google, I get perfectly readable PDF files. It's as if Google's PDF crawler has the same bug.

Has anyone figured this out? Is this an Acrobat Reader bug?

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