PDFs and Networked Printers
- by Bart Silverstrim
Weird issue.
We have users printing to networked windows-shared printers (print server Win2003 sp2). Some users have been reporting recently that they can't print PDF documents to particular printers (two example printers are HP 2430 PCL 6 driver and 4250 PCL 6 driver).
At first, we found that on many of these systems the "Everyone" object was added to the permissions for the root of the C: volume but had no permissions checked. We added modify privileges to it (these are Deep-Freeze systems, so modifications to these systems that we don't add as administrators won't matter) and they seemed to be able to print. Perhaps Acrobat Reader was writing a temp file for printing where users didn't have permission, we surmised, and made the change and moved on.
Yesterday the user called in saying it's not working still.
Looked at it; bring up a PDF, click Print and the reader app says that you have to install a printer. Look at the printers folder (Windows XP workstation), and it has printers installed. Print a test page, return to AcroReader, and it will print fine to that printer.
The whole time web pages, MS Office documents, etc. print without issue to the same printers.
Has anyone seen this issue with Acro Reader 9 and certain network printer drivers or shares involving HP printers? I'd post this to SuperUser but it seems to be associated with a networked printer issue, seems to affect subsets of users but may be more widespread and our users aren't reporting it to us assuming we just know about it, and I've not found rhyme or reason as to why it's affecting just PDF printing and particular printers. The print spoolers are all running on the workstations and print server without errors being logged so far, but I'm going through the logs now to see if I can find anything out of place.
