PDF Export heads up

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This is mostly just a quick heads up to anyone who may have experienced a similar issue to what I had recently. A couple of months ago I was using XX (v5 at the time) to create a character sheet for a roleplaying game (for the English version of a Japanese RPG called Tenra Bansho, I'll put the sheet up on my website as soon as the game is released), and exporting it to PDF was no problem, except when it printed out, half the outlines on the boxes wouldn't print. Very odd, I thought, so I recreated the backgrounds from scratch, exported again, and it worked.

Fast forward to 2 weeks ago, when I was doing a new sheet for the Mouse Guard RPG, and I ran into the same problem, this time with XDP6. Export to PDF was fine, viewing was fine, but printing would bomb out halfway through Page 2. I'd gotten as far as scanning in the resulting print, taking a screenshot of the page for comparison, and writing up a draft here asking for advice on the problem, when I said to myself, hang on, I've got 4 other PCs in the house, let me try printing from one of the others. Lo and behold, it printed fine fro a PC running Adobe Reader 9.

Turns out the cause of the problem was the fact that even through 2 nuke-&-paves (one to install Win7 beta, the other to switch to the full version I'd bought once the beta expired), I'd never bothered to upgrade the version of Foxit reader I was using, instead of downloading a new version, I'd simply installed the one I had in my Downloads folder. Once I'd gotten rid of the old version (2.3) and installed the most recent (4.1), no more printing problems.

The morals of the story:

1. The cause of a problem is not always immediately apparent,
2. Don't let your perceptions of your own technical expertise get in the way of basic troubleshooting, and
3. Always keep your software up to date.

-- Ben

[steve.ledger]

Good story and good advice Ben.. Especially moral 3

[jclements]

#3

You mean when Microsoft releases a new version of its operating system, run out, buy, and install it immediately?

[Soquili]

#3

You mean when Microsoft releases a new version of its operating system, run out, buy, and install it immediately?

John that has worked for me since DOS 2.0 was released.

Of course back then the entire OS was on one 5 and a quarter inch floppy disk.

[Rik]

Oh Bill.

You've just reminded me again.

I used to have Windows 1 on a floppy disk and I went and lost it.

[Soquili]

Rik, Windows 1?

Was that ever distributed? I know we had evaluation versions at the Pentagon back in the mid 1980s. Monochrome with generic icons for the DOS applications, no true Windows apps available at that time.

Windows 3.0 was a big improvement, but it wasn't until version 3.1 was released that Windows became a widely distributed OS.

[JaffDave]

Windows 1 was called Windows Premiere Edition but i don't recall seeing it for sale until Windows 3

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I will admit I did jump on the Win7 beta bandwagon, but before that I wouldn't touch anything MS for at least 6-9 months after release, and in the case of Vista, not at all.

-- Ben