Printing tips | Acrobat, Reader

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Click the picture below to open instructions for that task.

If you are having problems printing, try this quick fix first. 

If you are using Acrobat 9.4.2, see Printing problems | Acrobat 9.4.2 update. 

See this troubleshooting article for additional solutions, such as updating your printer driver and copying your file to your hard drive. 

Forums have discussions about issues similar to yours. To participate in a community forum, type the description of your issue in the search box on the Acrobat or Adobe Reader forum, or the AcrobatUsers.com Printing & Prepress forum. When posting on forums, include your operating system and your product's version number.

Print even pages first, reload the pages, and then print odd pages. You sometimes have to print some pages in reverse order to get the correct page sequence. To learn more, see "Print double-sided using a single-sided printer" in the article Print double-sided.  

You cannot change the colors as you print. If you have Acrobat, you can use the Edit Document Text tool (Acrobat X) or TouchUp Text tool (Acrobat 9) to change the color of the text before you print. To learn more in Acrobat X, see Edit text. In Acrobat 9, see Edit text. 

The creator of the PDF did not embed the fonts used in the document. Embedding prevents font substitution when you view or print the document, and ensures that you see the text in its original font. If you don't have the original fonts installed on your computer, a substitute font is temporarily used for any font not embedded in the PDF. To learn more, see Font embedding and substitution. 

The Print dialog box does not provide an option to change only the font size. You can do any of the following to enlarge the font:

• Scale the entire PDF out to the page margins. See "Manually scale using percentages" in the article Print: scale or resize pages.
• Print a selected portion of the PDF and scale it using Fit to Printable Area. See Print a portion of the page.
• (Acrobat only) To change the font size for a specific page or the entire document, use the Edit Document Text tool (Acrobat X) or TouchUp Text tool (Acrobat 9). To learn more, for Acrobat X see Edit text; for Acrobat 9 see Edit text.

Most printers provide options to save ink. Click Properties in the Print dialog box to find printer-specific options. To learn more, see the video Printing documents in Acrobat and Reader X.