Excel 2000 SP3 printing issue: text is either rotated (each individual letter) or small or not even

[Kyle Herrmann]

This is regarding Excel 2000 running on a Windows 2000 Professional system.
One of my users is having an issue printing from Excel. The document
appears to be quite basic, but when she prints it to a color printer (HP CLJ
5500 PS) the letters in the black text are individually rotated 90 degrees,
although the string of characters remains horizontal. This does not affect
the text that is colored red, only the black text, strangely not all of it,
like there is a heading on the chart, and that is fine, but doesn't appear
to be any different than the rest of the text. When she prints to a B&W
printer (HP 8100 series PS) it comes out just fine. Either way, her print
previews look good, but

When I try and reproduce the results on my machine I get similarly bizarre,
but different results despite the fact that it is the same setup and using
the same drivers installed through Click N Print. Printing to the black and
white printer leaves me with a chart where most of the black text is printed
in 1 point font...very hard to read. The strange thing here is that the
heading text that wasn't affected on my users machine was now shrunk,
although other black text that wasn't affected on her machine appears to
print normally. The print preview is also quite strange on my machine, all
the black text looks to be pushed together so much that it's practically
like the letters are on top of eachother.

Not sure if this is a driver issue, or a corrupted doc or something...I have
also printed to a HP 4050 series PCL 5e, so it doesn't appear to be a
PostScript versus PCL issue.

Anyone have any ideas of what to look at or tweak to further test this
issue?

Thanks.

 

[Kyle Herrmann]

One other thing. When I try and print to the color printer from my machine
the black text doesn't come out at all...it's completely missing....except
in the footer, which has the date in monotype corsiva.

 

[Ed Ferrero]

Hi Kyle,

A couple of things to check.
- make sure that the zoom level on the worksheet is set to 100%
(some printer drivers don't like you viewing the page at
other zoom levels)
- look at the print options - are you using printer fonts or
windows fonts?
- download the latest printer driver from HP

 

[Kyle Herrmann]

Ed,

Thanks for the note. In further testing I discovered that if she chooses
the plain Arial it prints fine, but the font she had chosen was @Arial
Unicode MS. I am not familiar with that font, but I will look into how the
printer is printing fonts, as to whether it is using printer fonts or
windows fonts.

 

[Judy]

Ed,

Thanks for the note. In further testing I discovered that if she chooses
the plain Arial it prints fine, but the font she had chosen was @Arial
Unicode MS. I am not familiar with that font, but I will look into how the
printer is printing fonts, as to whether it is using printer fonts or
windows fonts.

Are you using a Japanese (or Chinese) Windows system?
The "@" at the start of a font name means that this is a Far Eastern
"vertical writing" font, which does mean that at least some of the
characters should be rotated.
This (probably) doesn't explain all of the oddities, but it may
explain some of them.
The different behaviour on different printers may just be that the
5500 is newer and thinks it understands vertical writing fonts and the
that 8100 doesn't. Or possibly the other way round!

Hope this helps.

Judy