pdf file won't print out

I have a pdf file showing a map of Cornwall rail and road connections that won’t print out. Neither could my Wife print it out using her laptop running Mickeysoft Windows 10. You can download the file from here and try for yourself.

I did manage to print it out by first converting it to a sprite. Before that I converted it to a Drawfile, but that weighed in at 43MB! Even the sprite file weighed in at 7MB with a slightly altered version (scaled down) at 2Mb. The pdf is 0.85MB in size.

It’s printed here quite happily from the Document Viewer on Linux Mint 20.2 Cinnamon feeding a Brother DCP-L3550CDW colour laser printer/scanner.

Perhaps it’s protected in some way about which Linux couldn’t care less.

Printed here on Windows 8.1 / Acrobat Pro :-)

Document doesn’t seem to have any security or be inhibited from printing.

Unrelated to printing, it’s missing the National Rail symbol from Falmouth, Penryn and Perranwell.

Being in Cornwall at the moment, I’d definitely recommend printing everything out, and not relying on the internet!

Prints fine here Windows 10 Acrobat Reader DC

Can anyone get it printed out on RISC OS?

It may be of use to know that some PDFs fail to open unless you’re using Acrobat Reader.
I don’t know the detail, but apparently staff were having problems opening clinical letters¹ when Chrome or Edge updates had been installed more recently than Acrobat Reader and thus grabbed the default PDF handling.

So, RO PDF handling may be a non-starter with current software.

¹ Hardcopy versions are a rarity, even patients are encouraged to sign up for electronic submission and GPs (excepting recent conversions) changed over a decade ago.

You can download the file from here and try for yourself.

It appears to be printing to PDF (the cable that I use for the laser is currently plugged into the rice cooker, so I can’t use that) using !PDF v3.02.1.24.1 (6 Mar 2017) and RISC OS 5.29 (15 Jul 2021). Note, however, that it created a temporary scrap file 59MB in size, so I would expect the resultant PDF (if it doesn’t crash) to be equally awful. However, output to a raster printer ought to work if it gets this far. It does, however, take ages to do anything.

Edit: Yup, it has created a ~10MB PDF that is the map placed badly on a page. Probably would have been better if I’d selected landscape. Either way, it went through the RISC OS printer system and came out the other end a lot larger, but it did work.

It may be of use to know that some PDFs fail to open unless you’re using Acrobat Reader.

With my experience on Android, Drive PDF Viewer is way better than Adobe Acrobat, that frequently suffers from one of the following (or both):

• Printing a subset of pages (say, 7-9) will print the required number of pages counting from page one.

• Opening the document results in a completely blank page.

• It tells me the document is corrupt.

In a (small) win for RISC OS, the PDF application happily opens the current schedule for the Châteaubriant-Nantes tram-train. I’m looking at it right now. That’s more than Acrobat on Android can manage!

So, RO PDF handling may be a non-starter with current software.

I think the problem may be that while PDFs are supposed to be standardised, there seems to be a certain amount of liberty and rule breaking going on. Which means that how well a PDF is supported depends upon both the file creator and the file viewer. Generally it works, but not always.

Hardcopy versions are a rarity, even patients are encouraged to sign up for electronic submission

I keep being pestered by Orange, EDF, and my bank to switch to electronic copies of bills and statements, which I refuse. As a foreigner, I am expected to provide originals of certain documents as proof of residence and income, etc etc. To have an electronic copy that I print myself (and can likely easily modify) is no proof of anything at all.
Most of the paperwork I receive goes on a pile where it is forgotten about until somebody somewhere says “I need X that’s less than Y months old” where I can dig up the appropriate bit of paper and hand it over.
Maybe now I have an actual proper residency permit, they’ll just look at that instead.

Besides, I’m not entirely sure that neither a bank nor a major telecoms provider has any justification talking about “saving the planet”, given that the types of environmentally friendly things these sorts of companies do is mostly greenwashing to make them look like they’re doing something. If we really actually cared that much about the planet, we wouldn’t be burning dead dinosaurs or splitting atoms in order to stare at our computers to read rubbish like this written by somebody else staring at his computer, all the while our machines connected in various ways to a giant global network by virtue of little boxes that are always turned on, always consuming power, and a massive infrastructure between the two, also consuming plenty of power just to give us the convenience of being able to stand in the middle of a muddy field in the middle of nowhere and look up something utterly pointless like “who wrote The Witcher books?” which is really something so important at that moment in time.

something utterly pointless like “who wrote The Witcher books?” which is really something so important at that moment in time

Huh??

Not something I recall seeing on the shelves in Waterstones last time I visited. That was 2019 though, and some stuff happened between then and now.

Well, damn. Standing in a not muddy field with my cat, I can tell you Andrzej Sapkowski, and his books have been translated since the ’90s.

Maybe with the new Netflix series, they might be easier to find now? €11,07 for dead tree or €2,99 for Kindle from Amazon (English version). Though note that a general opinion is that the writing is disjointed (maybe Polish doesn’t translate well?) and rather misogynistic (the females seem to exist to sleep with Geralt….Uh, I hope not – Ciri? Ewww!).

I printed it out with no problem using !PDF 3.02.1.24.1 (6 Mar 2017) and Gutenprint.

Having said “no problem”, I notice that !PDF shows the sea white, and that’s how it prints out, whereas whatever Ubuntu is using shows the sea blue. (May be Evince, but the information tab invites me to install it. How am I using it if it isn’t installed?)

I can confirm the print success with !PDF 3.02 and its white sea. Rather than Gutenprint, I always print via !PS3 – M. Würthners priceless PS3 driver.

!PDFView also displays and prints the file, with the same white sea, but I suspect that both programs make use of the same engine.

!MuView 0.04 displays the file quickly and accurately, but unfortunately lacks a print option.

!ArtWorks was loading the file for more than 15 minutes (even on a Pi4), after which I decided to cancel the process. But I tend to believe that its PDF-management doesn’t really line up with the quality of all the other tools.
Nevertheless, displaying and printing the file on RISC OS appears to be perfectly possible.

Most of the paperwork I receive goes on a pile where it is forgotten about until somebody somewhere says “I need X that’s less than Y months old” where I can dig up the appropriate bit of paper and hand it over.

That’s a long description of my “in-tray”

Most of the paperwork I receive goes on a pile where it is forgotten about until somebody somewhere says “I need X that’s less than Y months old” where I can dig up the appropriate bit of paper and hand it over.

Same here – I keep refusing to allow my bank to change my credit card bills to paperless, because banks in particular want them to prove identity. For example just recently to become a signatory for a charity account run by a bank different from the one I use.

Neither could my Wife print it out using her laptop running Mickeysoft Windows 10

Printed in a couple of seconds with Foxit Reader on Windows 10. (Foxit Reader is useful when you get one of those “edit this and send it back, but you can’t save” documents. Foxit will edit and save just fine, and the saved copy can be further edited.)

Thanks for replies. I was probably usig PDFtest as that’s the PDF viewer that pops up when I double-click on a PDF. I don’t relish trying again as the laser printer will use a lot of blue powder.