Automated legacy VB6 app app prints ocassionally prints non legible text aka Greeking

[jtthomps]

I am not super technical so I will explain the best I can. We are a manufactoring business that has 6 plant/distribution centers in the United States and Canada. We have a somewhat complex internal written VB6 application that automatically prints material data saftey sheets (aka MSDS sheets) in batches at the plant floor during the pick and packaging process. We have a few HP 4200 and 4300 printers that have been printing non legible text (aka Greeking) when printing from this legacy application which prints PDF files through Adobe Reader that sits on a ECS job scheduling server. We have event driven scheduling jobs on the ECS server that is triggered from our legacy inventory system that builds these batch MSDS PDFs. This does not happen at all the plant locations or for all the MSDS printers or all the print jobs. There are probably a few dozen print jobs each day at each MSDS printer and the PDF pages vary from 4 pages to 250 pages (batches) and the file size is little as a 100kb to 85 mb.

1. We have changed the the dpi from 600 tp 300 on these HP printers.

2. Confirmed that we have 60 mb ram on each of these HP printers.

3. Replaced the print driver (PCL5e, etc) several times on these HP printers.

4. Rebooted the servers, print servers several times.

Once we started to look at when these print jobs typically start printing greeking is around the 125-175 page mark within a single PDF/print job. The back to back smaller print jobs seem to print out OK. We also noticed that the greeking text on these MSDS sheets aren't actually greeking. But all the letters and numbers are 1 off. So on the greeked MSDS sheets if there should be a "A" in the beginning of a sentence is has "B" and if there should be a "1" there is a "2" listed, etc. We have verified that the characters in PDF print preview on the ECS server look fine and appear to be standard fonts like Aerial, etc. But the output on the printer becomes greek on these larger print jobs.

We have read where users recommend "print as image" and we made that change via Adobe Reader and we are still getting greeking for the bigger print jobs. But our programmer can't 100% guarantee it is printing as image since this is printing from the command line. The problem we are running into internally is the printer team says this is an application problem and application team says this issue is not widespread and isolated to the larger print jobs on two or three HP printers. So it is a printer, print driver, print spooler issue.

Any recommendations would help because we are running out of options. We are looking at writing a little application to replace Adobe reader so we have better control over the output and be reassured it prints as image.

Thanks,