random grey boxes

[cchaseART13]

Hi there,

I work for a small third party travel agency, we create roadbooks for our clients and other sorts of documentations. I print the PDF files on a Sharp MX 5111N PCL6

Unfortunately at random there will be a grey box that prints right over the text or picture. Sometimes there isn't anything where the grey box is. You cannot see the grey box on the file before it's printed, and if you reprint the file or just the page where the grey box was the print will come out correctly with no grey box.

The issue is this happens so randomly, I cannot recreate it.

I use a Dell Windows 7, I've tried using a different computer to print the books and after printing about 40 books I've found a grey box on 1 of the books.

The IT person at the company I work for doesn't know what it is, and the company that services the printers have no idea why this is happening either. I'm really at a loss with this situation.

Any help would be appreciated!

[Nancy OShea]

You've posted in the non-technical Lounge.

Which Adobe product or service are you printing PDFs from? 

Nancy

[cchaseART13]

Hi @Nancy OShea,

I'm sorry, I'm not really a computer person. I'm trying my best to learn lol... I'm printing from Adobe Acrobat XI Pro

[Nancy OShea]

Which software was used to create the original document?  I don't think this is a printer malfunction as much as a problem with the original document. 

Nancy

[cchaseART13]

Hi there,

here is an example of the issue. (the page is double sided so it looks like the box is over the text, but that's the text from the other side showing thru) Hopefully someone has some sort of idea. does it have to do with Adobe or is it a printer issue?  Printers are MX-5111N driver PCL6

[cchaseART13]

Well this grey box issue happens to two separate types of documents that we send to our clients.

1 is made by a company called Kreios -- per an email with one of the creators of their program "we do not rely on any Adobe Product during the fernation process of the PDF, when we create the PDF we rely on a proprietary PDF rendering engine. One the PDF is created, we use ghostscriptv9.14 to optimize the PDF in size. once the pdf has been generated and optimized via ghostscript we then upload the PDF to your FTP server" The program is called MyTravelGuide v1.2

http://kreios.lu/mytravelguide.html

The other product/document I print is made on InDesign CS5, then turned into a PDF. The person who creates this exports the InDesign files as a high quality print and then uploads them to DropBox for me to save.

[cchaseART13]

Also when I reprint the document that the grey box appeared on in the print, it prints without error.

There is no issue with the document when it's viewed on the computer.

[cchaseART13]

Does anyone have any idea? Or is anyone able to help me?

[Bernd Alheit]

What happens when you print to "Adobe PDF" ?

[kdlsith]

I have found a possible solution.

Problem: document scanned in color (which I have no control over)

Result: when printed to photocopier (which uses threshold to print), I get grey boxes all over the place.

Solution (Acrobat Pro 2017): before OCRing (although it should work after that as well), go into Edit>Edit Text & Images. The program will do some rendering and then a bunch of grey wirelines will appear (around the text). You should also see some wirelines denoting images (which should be your grey box). Left click to select in the wireline and hit delete. It should remove the grey box. You can also do this to remove a colored background.