I support a few macs for our staff and one of the macs in question starting having an issue where when the job would reach the printer instead of the job printing out, a bunch of jumbled code would print out instead. This has happened on multiple printers even after removing all current printers and resetting the printing system on the OS and adding the printers again fresh. I haven't been able to find anything about an issue like this on the net yet and was hoping for a solution short of wiping and re-imaging the HDD.
Both Word 2011 and webpages viewed from Safari were sent as test print jobs. The OS is 10.9.5 and both printers are Ricoh models, though different ones. I specifically downloaded the correct drivers and both were setup via LDP and IP address.
I have tried physically deleting all printer drivers from the library folder and was prompted to download and reinstall the printer drivers as I setup the printers again to test but the same issue happened again.
Here is an example of what happens.
A simple word 2011 document with only the words: test print
returns this
%!PS-Adobe-3.0
%APL_DSC_Encoding: UTF8
%APLProducer: (Version 10.9.5 (Build 13f109
14 blank pages
14 dict begin/FontName /KUFZPG+Cambria def
/PaintType 0 def
then a bunch of dup callouts and multi-line string of alphanumeric characters and the closing brackets on those opening tags.
/Encoding 256 array 0 1 255[index exch/ .notdef put}for
Best Answer
That 'weird code' is actually PostScript, and is the raw data of the print job.
If this is a large network printer, these models very often have different LPD queues to which you can send the job. These can define the expected input data. (E.g. my HP 5200 has "RAW", "AUTO", "BINPS", and "TEXT" as LPD queues.) Check the manual of the printer, and see what print queues are offered, and make sure you configure the 'Printer' in MacOS to send to a particular queue.