Why a PDF prints wrong

This is the most common one by a wide margin. Answers typed into a PDF form live in form fields, which are a layer above the page rather than part of it. Some viewers do not print that layer, and some print it only if a setting is enabled — the answers are in the file, they are simply not being drawn.

The reliable fix is to flatten the form, which writes the field contents into the page itself. After that every viewer and every printer shows the same thing, and the answers can no longer be altered — which for anything being submitted is usually what you want anyway.

The same mechanism explains a filled form that arrives looking empty in somebody's phone mail app.

Printers cannot print to the paper edge; every one has a non-printable margin of a few millimetres. A PDF whose content runs closer to the edge than that will lose it.

Two fixes, depending on what you can change. In the print dialog, 'Fit to printable area' or 'Shrink oversized pages' scales the page down slightly so everything lands inside the margin. If you need the content to stay at full size, cropping the page to trim excess whitespace and then printing at 100% works better than scaling.

A page that is the wrong size for the paper produces the same symptom: an A4 document printed on US Letter loses about 18 mm off the bottom, and Letter on A4 leaves a gap and shifts the position.

PDFs normally embed the fonts they use so that they render identically anywhere. When a font is not embedded, the viewer substitutes the closest thing it has, and the printer may substitute something different again — so line breaks move and the layout shifts between screen and paper.

This usually comes from a file produced by software that assumed the font would be present. Rebuilding the file's structure will sometimes resolve inconsistencies; where the font genuinely is not in the file, the dependable fix is to go back to the source document and export it again with fonts embedded.

Slides and dark-mode exports print as a solid block of toner. Inverting the colours before printing turns them back to dark text on white — cheaper, faster and considerably easier to read on paper.

Check the page count before a class or meeting set goes to the printer as well. Deleting the pages nobody needs is quicker than telling everyone to skip them.

If the document will not print from any application, the file may be damaged rather than the printer misbehaving — a truncated download is the usual cause, and it often still opens well enough to look fine.

Some PDFs also carry a permission flag that asks viewers not to print. It is advisory, and many viewers ignore it, but some honour it. If a document you own refuses to print and prints fine after being rebuilt, that was the reason.

The symptoms are distinguishable if you print a single page rather than the whole document, which also saves the paper.

If the page comes out blank but the document shows content on screen, it is the form-field layer. If content is missing only at one edge, it is the printable margin or a paper-size mismatch. If the text is all present but the line breaks fall in different places than on screen, it is a font substitution. If nothing emerges at all and other documents print, the file itself is likely damaged or carries a permission flag.

One more worth ruling out first, because it is embarrassing and common: check that the print dialog is not set to a page range, to a duplex mode the printer does not have, or to 'Print as image' from a previous job.