Equations are printed with characters omitted, clipped, or substituted

TechNote 77

Applicability

Issue

When printing documents containing MathType 7 equations, some equations may contain the wrong characters, some characters may be clipped from the right side of the equation, or characters may be omitted, most commonly parentheses.

Reason

The problem most likely is with the printer driver and may be corrected by updating the printer driver or adjusting its settings. A printer driver is the software program your computer uses to control (or "drive") your printer. When an application prints a document, the printer driver is used to create the series of commands your computer sends to your printer, which tells the printer how to render (draw or print) your document. If your equations appear correctly on your screen, the graphics files must be correct. If they were not, your video driver (used by your computer to control your monitor display) would not be able to display the equation correctly either.

Solution

This notice provides general suggestions for resolving printing problems. Unfortunately, since printer drivers vary widely between manufacturers, and even among printer models and driver versions for the same manufacturer, we can only provide suggestions that apply to all printer drivers, making this notice generic, but universally applicable.

Check for a newer (or older) printer driver

Your first step should be to determine which printer model you have and then go to your printer manufacturer's website and see if they provide a newer driver for it that runs under your operating system. Many common printer manufacturers are listed below:

If If the driver you have is older than the one currently available, download the newer driver and install it per the instructions given on the printer manufacturer's website. Try printing the document again once you have installed the more recent driver. Unlike most other devices, you do not need to remove your old printer driver to install a new one. Having multiple drivers installed provides more options when you do experience printing problems. If the manufacturer offers various drivers, you may need to try more than one to find a driver that fixes the issue you are experiencing.

If you already have the latest printer driver installed, you can try earlier drivers, which you may be able to find on the manufacturer's website. Sometimes new bugs or other incompatibilities are introduced in more recent drivers.

Every installed printer driver will have a different printer name, even though they may be associated with the same printer.

Suppose you are using a PostScript printer and none of the drivers provided by the manufacturer, Microsoft, or Apple corrects your printing problems. In that case, you may want to try the generic PostScript printer Adobe offers on their website, which should work with any PostScript printer and may resolve your printing problem.