Quark Printing Problems

Probably a font related issue. Most Quark glitches are based upon font problems.

I'm having the same problem right now - printing from quark to hp1320. I can create a new file and it will print. Some old files will print but many result in pages of gibberish. Did you find any solutions?

This sounds like a rendering problem.

1 how are you printing to this printer? Check and make sure you're sending PostScript and that the printer expects PostScript. If the printer expects PCL you're going to have a problem.

2 how much RAM is installed on the printer? PostScript needs space to run, especially if you have graphics. The printer ships with, IIRC, 16MB. I think that there's a single DIMM slot and that it will accept up to a 128MB DIMM. I don't know if you have to pull the 16 to put in a new DIMM; I doubt it, no-one's made 16MB RAM sticks in quite a while, so that 16 is probably hard-wired to the printer. I don't know what kind of DIMM you need; if it's SDRAM, the price for a 128 will likely be on the order of $40-60. Check Crucial, I've found that they're reliable RAM distributors. I'd max the RAM if I intended to print layouts with graphics.

3 what kind of files print, and what kind of files don't print? Are there fonts which are common to both types? Are there graphics elements common to both? Are there fonts which are different, or graphics elements which are different? Warning: low-end HPs with low RAM really, really, REALLY don't like fancy stuff, such as lots of starbursts or lots of blends or lots pictures at funny angles, or, worst of all, a combination of all three. They will barf.

4 Quark will read all kinds of graphics formats. Unless you have a really, really, REALLY good reason, stick with EPSes, TIFFs or JPGs. Use grayscale for monochrome or spot color, and CYMK for full color. PNGs will usually work. Mostly. Especially grayscale PNGs. It's a bad idea to use BMPs, PICTs, or GIFs.

I had this same problem happen to me with stupid Quark.
My solution (at this point) was to create new printer descriptions for our two printers that utilize Appletalk instead of the HP JetDirect IP that all others Apps utilize.
This is a pain, but was the only solution I cam up with?
Course now I have 4 sets of printers showing up in Quark. All I did was add (quark) after the Printer name so my Designers knew which one to pick when using Quark.
Hope this helps and if anyone comes up with a better way (besides getting rid of Quark) please let me know.

Funny - I've never had any of these problems since Quark 4. At that point my issue was based on Quark 4 not reading imported PDF's properly - and having people to save backwards compatible from 5 to 4. This just doesn't sound the same. Quark 6.5 doesn't seem to like Adobe PDF's from Acrobat 6.5 professional or later, but this is a simple fix 9using the PDF optimizer and bringing it back to 5)

We spent a lot of time checking software, hardware, network connections, etc. We found that this problem happened on our HP printers, not Epson, and went away by changing all our EPS file formats from Binary to ASCII. It's a problem I hope Quark or HP can fix.