weird behaviour of HP1050 Deskjet
 

I scanned in some pages of German grammar, using ABBYY Fine Reader on the office computer/ Toshiba printer/copier/scanner.

The pages contain some text in German, some in Chinese, and some tables that contain examples of adjective declination in German.

I then put the .docx file to my laptop, and went home to tidy it up a bit. After scanning it is sometimes a bit higgeldy-piggeldy. Of course, I use Ubuntu and Libre Office, so I have to import the .docx file.

When I tried to print the final file, page one stopped every time about half way down the page, just after printing a bit of text notes under the table. Page 2, just containing text, no tables, printed fine on its own.

The weirdest bit was, I printed the file in the office, then thought, well, I can just copy it using the HP 1050 at home. But everytime I tried it stopped at the beginning of the first table!

I printed 2 pages of text, to check if there was a fault. They printed ok. I printed a pdf, no trouble.

Can anyone explain what is going on here??

When you say you printed a pdf, do you mean you printed a pdf of the problem file or of something else?

If not, try exporting the file from LO as a pdf and printing the pdf from your pdf reader. That should help determine whether the problem is with the printer or with the file (which is what I think is more likely).

I had a *.docx sent to me the other day which was such a formatting mess from the originator that I couldn't even open it in LO. I was able to open it in Calligra Writer enough to view the contents, but it was still a formatting mess.

Well, I printed another text file from .odt, and a sheet of text which was part of a pdf, just to test the printer. Both printed ok. The problem lies with this particular .docx transformed to .odt I think. However, that will not explain why I can't even copy it on my HP 1050! Weird!

Maybe somehow the combination of Chinese, German and Tables in the file is somehow confusing the printer driver, but why the hell won't it just copy it?? That is just a bit map!

Hey! I exported it from LO as a pdf, as you suggested, and it printed fine!! Thanks! Still weird though!

I would guess that there is malformed formatting in the *.docx file which LO chokes on when trying to send the print job.

It's entirely possible that the document looks okay on the screen, but is a massive disaster behind the scenes, kind of like bad electrical wiring and plumbing that has been covered up with wallboard to look pretty.

When the document gets converted to an image for the *.PDF, that formatting gets lost and all you have is a picture of the wallboard, which can then print.

Without seeing the actual docx though, this is only a theory.

It possible to see the non-printable formatting info of my .odt file, in the same way as I can view the html source code of any given webpage?? Can I see the raw data of a .odt file??

I know in Word I can choose 'draft view', then I can get rid of a lot of section breaks and page breaks and stuff, which is what I do after scanning, before I put the file on my laptop to convert to .odt

Under the "View" item on the menu bar, there are options to show lots of formatting that is normally hidden.

I seldom use it, but, if it exists, what you are looking for will most likely be there.