Help with Issues that Might Arise with Printables

I Can’t Find the Printable that I Purchased or the Freebie that I Requested

Be sure to check your spam or junk folder first. After that, you can drop me an email and I can try to find out what happened.

My Printable is Fuzzy or Unclear

Possible clarity issues that you might be having:

• Things on the printable look fuzzy
• Parts of the printable just aren’t showing up (like a word search)
• Other crazy things that just don’t seem right

Things to do to fix it:

• Make sure you are using the most recent version of the free Adobe Acrobat Reader
• Right click on the image and choose “Save Link As” and download the document to your computer. Then, open it from your computer, rather than through your web browser’s PDF plugin, as this can sometimes cause some blurriness or other issues.
• Another solution can be to download the printable in a different web browser than you usually use.  I find that this is worst for me in Mozilla Firefox.  I do not seem to have those same issues in Google Chrome or Apple’s web browser – Safari.

I Can Open My Printable, But It Won’t Print

While I can’t help with individual printer troubleshooting, here are some links that you should definitely check out because they are extremely helpful.

1. Troubleshooting PDF Printing – this has lots of different scenarios and suggestions for all of them. It’s from Adobe and is incredibly thorough and helpful
2. I can’t print a PDF file. How do I get it to print? – This is actually just one suggestion of how to make it print (and it’s also mentioned in the link above), but I liked this simple suggestion with easy directions.

When I Print the Document, a Black Box Shows Up Instead of Graphics

First – my biggest suggestion is to open the document in the free Adobe Acrobat Reader, which is likely already on your computer or device, instead of the built-in PDF previewer in a web browser. (PDF files were invented by Adobe. Adobe is the best place to open them.) That almost always solves the problem.

However, here are more tips:

1. Make sure you are using the latest version of Adobe Acrobat Reader – rather than a preview application or a web browser’s pdf viewer.  This is the most important step.
2. If you already have the updated version of Adobe Acrobat Reader, open the resource using Adobe and do the following:
   • Choose File –> Print
   • Click on Advanced
   • Check the “Print as Image” box and click OK.
   • Click the Print button

If you absolutely don’t want to use Adobe Acrobat Reader and only want to use your web browser’s PDF viewer, I would recommend trying to preview the document that is printing with a black box in a different web browser than you are currently using. This may (or may not) solve the issue for you.

The Printable is Asking for a Password to Open It

This has most recently been an issue with Safari’s PDF previewer, though it is not exclusive to Safari. There is a password on every printable on the site, but it is set up specifically only to need a password if someone tries to edit the document, not for opening, viewing, or printing a document. However, I have had people from time to time in the past year have the Safari PDF previewer be overzealous and say that it needs a password to even open it, which isn’t the case. (It is, apparently, a known problem.)

I always recommend opening a PDF file in Adobe Acrobat Reader instead of a PDF previewer on a web browser. Adobe Acrobat Reader may already be on your computer and is the native program for PDF files. If you don’t have it, it’s a great program to have on your computer and is free: https://get.adobe.com/reader/.

If you prefer not to use Adobe Acrobat Reader, I recommend opening it in the PDF previewer of a different web browser other than the one that is giving you a message that you need a password (examples: Google Chrome, and Microsoft Edge). Another option is to try to open the document on a different device or computer.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a solution for the Safari issue, since it’s on their end, and it seems to only happen to an extremely small number of people. You also might try updating Safari to see if you don’t have that issue on the latest version of it.