Printer Drivers (Word 2000SR-1/HP Laserjet 4050 PCL 5e)

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We’re having a problem printing some Word documents where Microsoft Word seems to calculate a bottom margin of approximately 2.7 inches (or the left margin in landscape mode) when printing to a few of our Laserjet printers (mostly 4050s, but some 4000s and 4100s). That is, when Word prints, it simply ignores the bottom of the page (it does not insert a soft break at the appropriate location).

Our printers are installed on the server side in an NT environment; all of the printers installed are using the PCL 5e driver. In one case, changing the driver to the PCL 6 seems to remedy the problem (but another user did not benefit from changing the driver). In any case, I was told that there were “known issues” printing from Word using a PCL 6 driver by our network guy–but they can’t seem to recall what those issues are.

Does anyone have any suggestions for what/where to look to try to solve this issue? Also, does anyone have any suggestions on what printer drivers work best/worst with Word on the Laserjet 4000-4100 series?

Thanks!

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We experienced very similar issues a few weeks ago as we upgraded users to Windows 2000 and Word 2000 at the same time.

Question: Are your users (client) on Windows 2000? And the server with the printer drivers on Win NT? If so, there seem to be some very particular ways in which you have to load the printer drivers on to the server. If it was NOT done from a Windows 2000 workstation, there is a conflict.

This is what we found:

It helps to use point and print bundles if they are available
Load drivers from same Windows environment workstation – if you used Windows 2000 drivers, then you need to be on a Windows 2000 machine
Update all firmware per HP’s instructions
Set security of print drivers so only administators can update the drivers on the servers

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Yes–we have also recently upgraded to Win2000/Word2000, printing through NT4 Servers.

However, I don’t quite understand what you’re proposing. Could you be a little more specific?

(Our NT4 Servers are setup to IP print to the client printers and do not use JetDirect.)

Thanks!

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We are having the same problem, it primarily seems to be when using Word. We just upgraded to Windows 2000 and Office 2002. The strange thing is that it doesn’t do it all the time, only after we have printed a few things, then it will start doing it. If I shut down Word and start up again, (no reboot) it will print normally for a while and then start again. Any help sure would be appreciated. Thanks.

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We get the best results with the PostScript drivers. We’re probably losing a feature or two, but…at least when you tell Word to print colored text as black (rather than gray scale) (in Tools, Options, Compatibility), with the PostScript driver it does!

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The problem with the extra large margins seems to be associated with if not caused by our server-side printer set-up for the HP 4000 and 4050 printers [the PCL6 driver for the 4100 seems to work properly, at least in this respect.]

We’ve set-up a couple of workstations with IP printing (instead of using the point-and-print functionality on the NT server) and those workstations have not, thus far, replicated the extra large margin issue.

[In attempts to replicate the margin problem in Word, we’ve tested with two table documents–one using a portrait table, the other a landscape table. The problem replicates most frequently in the portrait table if the landscape table is in print preview mode and vice versa–which leads me to make an (un)educated guess that there may be some kind of sharing or timing issue with the point-and-print drivers. This is NOT to say that the problem only occurs on table documents–we’ve seen it on letters where, in a couple of rather scary moments, letters were printed for signature and were discovered to be missing lines of text from the bottom of each page shortly before being sent out.]

[Incidentally, on at least a few of the workstations experiencing the extra large margin problem on the occasional Word document, we’ve seen a problem attempting to print Outlook contacts (and perhaps other items) in landscape view. This problem also appears to be fixed by switching to IP printing.]

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With the PostScript drivers we have problems with foreign characters not printing at all and, since PS drivers don’t recover from errors — sometimes the print jobs just vanish into the ether(net).

With the PCL drivers — make sure you have TrueType “download as soft font” selected or all kinds of wacky stuff happens (such as what Jefferson details above plus, font formatting in hdrs/ftrs doesn’t work right).

I’ve seen the margin weirdness you refer to and it is definitely a problem with the print drivers — we have both PS and PCL drivers loaded (on different servers) and switching from one to the other generally fixes the “margin” problem.

So many bugs that I wonder if anyone at HP tested these drivers with Word…

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