Stop your printer from printing random gibberish or symbols

This article explains how to stop a printer from outputting random characters and how to fix the underlying configuration issue.

Suddenly, your printer starts printing pages of symbols, unreadable characters, or “wingdings” that look like code. Your printer is not possessed, nor is it receiving messages from aliens. This common configuration issue happens when the print driver and the printer use different languages.

What causes random character output

When you send a print job, the print driver encodes the instructions for the printer into a Page Description Language (PDL) such as PostScript. Some of these languages are specific to certain printer brands and not interchangable. For example a Ricoh printer cannot understand Canon’s proprietary UFRII printer language.

This commonly happens when an office printer replaced with another brand, but still uses the same network address. When that happens the job is delivered to the printer encoded in the wrong language. Instead of a pretty print job, the confused printer interprets the raw code as a text, outputting the first few lines of code followed by many pages of random characters.

Prevent gibberish printing

This is a print driver configuration problem. It is not an issue with your document, computer, or printing software. Ensure you install a compatible driver for the printer you are using.

• If you are at home: Contact your printer manufacturer to find the correct driver for your specific printer model.

• If you are at a school or office: Contact your IT department. They configure the print queues and will update the driver on the print server or workstation.

• If you are the IT department: you’ll need to track down which workstation is using the wrong driver. Various printer brands have logs that may tell you the source of the print job. PaperCut products like NG and Pocket are DIY and can help you manage print drivers, helping to avoid this type of situation.

   

Troubleshooting with PaperCut

Although this is mainly a problem between the print driver and the printer, but you might be using PaperCut to deploy the print driver. Here’s some specific advice depending on whether you’re using our on-premise products, MF and NG, or our cloud products, Hive and Pocket.