Why can't my printer print a particular file

[mr friendly guy]

Its essentially a document that I need to sign. Unfortunately the relevant form is colour coded, so its a purple background with black letters. If was scanned and forwarded to me in pdf format, but my printer just will not print it. I try colour and grey scale formats, but only a few lines appear. I have try changing the file to jpg and word document, but again the same result. Its getting to the stage where I need to meet with the other person to sign the document, which kind of defeats the purpose of having a printer and scanner at my home.

Any ideas?

[tezunegari]

Which PDF-viewer are you using?

Asuming Adobe Acrobat, a PDF file can contain damaged content such as images or fonts that Acrobat cannot process during printing.
Try File > Print > Advanced -> "print as image" and print it again.

Can you print any other documents / images?

It might also be a bad sector on the disk.
Download the file again, if possible to a different drive or a usb stick.

[mr friendly guy]

I use adobe acrobat. I tried changing the cartridges and it prints better, but its hard to read the writing. I ended up getting the shop which sells cartridges to print it out for me. They using a different printer, so maybe thats the issue.

As for able to print other images, I assume so since I only printed stuff 2 days ago. Unless something got damaged between then and now. Shrugs.

[Sea Skimmer]

What printed, was it smeared in any way or had streaked lines? If it was, and even if it wasn't, you might want to print a cleaning page to flush out the printer head. One clogging up can make stuff print very faintly, but usually its also mucked up in other ways too. Changing the printer cartridge would only partly help this problem.