By Deep Shrestha Deep Shrestha IT Engineer ( B.E. in IT ) Deep Shrestha works as a computer hardware writer at TechNewsToday with several hardware and programming certifications. Although he has been writing technical content for more than a year, his interest. Full Bio
Learn about our editorial policies Updated December 10, 2022
If your PDF document isn’t printing, either your printer is faulty or there may be some issue with PDF settings. Both the printer and your PDF file must meet certain criteria to print your PDF document.
Below, we’ll discuss a few reasons why your PDF is not printing along with its fixes in detail.
The first thing you need to know is if the problem you are facing is in the printer or your pdf file. You can check this by trying to print any webpage or even a .doc file to know where the issue is.
The above are some of the most common reasons you cannot print a pdf. Now, let’s get onto what we should do to fix these issues.
If you cannot print any document, then the problem is with the printer. Here are some steps you can do to fix your printer issue.
Sometimes, if you have not set your printer as the default printer, it cannot print your document. To set a printer as your default printer, you can follow these steps:
You can update your printer drivers if your printer isn’t working. To update your driver, you can go to Control Panel > Device Manager > expand “Printer queues“> select your printer> right click and update.
After the update is complete, you can try to print the PDF file to see if it worked.
Another reason your PDF isn’t printing might be because there are already some files that are on the list of the printer that needs to be printed. The printer works on the First-In-First-Out policy, which means whichever file it gets first is printed.
To clear your printer queue, you can follow the following steps.
The print spooler is an in-built application that stores the printing tasks on your computer. Above mentioned steps may not always work while clearing files that are left to be printed. In that case, you can follow these steps to clear your print spooler.
Note: you have to be logged in as an administrator to do these steps.
Restart your computer and try to print your PDF.
This is kind of a last resort if nothing works on fixing the issue with the printer. Troubleshooting a device works in most cases, windows can figure out exactly what is wrong with the device and give a solution. You can troubleshoot a printer using the mentioned steps.
Windows will tell you what is wrong with your printer driver and suggest some fixes. Once you are done with the fixes, you can print your PDF file.
If the issue is not with the printer but something else, you can try the following fix.
This is one of the easiest fixes. All you have to do is to save the PDF file again as a different name or replace the existing one. Doing this removes some corrupted bits from the file and you will be able to print your file.
To unlock your PDF files, you can use websites like iLovepdf, Smallpdf. Once you are on the site, you can upload your locked pdf and get the unlocked version of it.
If your files are corrupted, there is nothing you can do except for using third-party software or a web application to recover and print those files. Software and websites such as recovery toolbox, SysInfotools PDF repair, Datanumen PDF repair, etc. can be used to uncorrupt those files.
This fix usually works for most of the users, as this fix doesn’t print the pdf but it prints the PDF as an image.
You can follow these steps to print a pdf as an image.
However, there is one disadvantage to it, as it can take a while to print. The final step of printing the document as an image works most of the time if your PDF document fails to print.
