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Tips for Printing PDFs

The following are some tips staff at the Canterbury Medical Library have put together, to help make printing PDFs a more successful exercise. Note: For the best results, be sure to go through the tips in the same order as they appear below.

Check that you are using the correct Print button. You must use the Print button within Adobe Acrobat Reader. (When an Adobe file opens within Internet Explorer it is easy to use the browser print icon by mistake.)

Wait for the file to fully open. ProQuest and some other providers create very large files and these can take a few minutes to open. To check if the file is fully downloaded/open, take your cursor down to the taskbar. If it changes to the hourglass (or other 'working' indication) then the file is not yet ready to print.

Tick the box labelled ' Print as image'. This is found in the dialogue box that names the printer to which your file is being sent.

Try printing one page at a time. It is possible that the file is too large for your printer to handle. To print just one page, enter a page number in the 'Print' dialogue box mentioned above. If this is successful, then all the other pages can be printed in this way.

Check the version of Adobe Acrobat reader that you are using. Most files now need Acrobat Reader version 5 or above. The Reader is available free to download from many websites.

Save the file first. Printing a PDF is faster if you have already saved it onto the hard drive of your computer or onto the network.

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