PDF from Windows shows up fine on screen in Preview but prints as question marks in boxes

pdfpreviewprinting

Similar – yet puzzlingly different from this question:

This PDF displays with question marks instead of letters

My case shows up fine on the screen, but prints with question marks in boxes (as seen, evidently on screen, in the question linked to.) Even the usually effective trick of saving to (another) pdf from the print dialog and then printing that looks fine on screen and still prints question-marks in boxes…

Best Answer

My guess is there's an issue with the character encoding in the document. Unless you're up to playing with OCR (optical character recognition), try the following:

  1. Open the document in Preview.
  2. "Export" the PDF as a PDF from Preview (crazy, I know). Do this from the Preview menu instead the print dialog.
  3. Print the exported PDF.