Comment by krylon

One of our users complained that she could no longer print PDF documents. Everything else, Word, Excel, graphics, worked fine, but when she printed a PDF ... the printer did emit a page that - layout-wise - pretty much looked like it was supposed to, except all the text was complete and utter nonsense.

Or was it? I took one of the pages back to my desk, and later in the day I had an idle moment, and my eyes wandered across the page. The funny thing is, if I had not known what text was supposed to be on the page, I would not have noticed, but the text was not random at all. Instead, all the letters had been shifted by one place in the alphabet (i.e. "ABCD" became "BCDE").

I went back to the user and told her to check the little box that said "Print text as graphics" in the PDF viewers printing dialog, and voila - the page came out of the printer looking the way it was supposed to.

Printing that way did take longer than usual (a lot longer), but at least the results were correct.

To this day, I have no clue where the problem came from, and unfortunately, I did not have the time to investigate the issue further. I had never seen such a problem before or after.

In a way it's part of what I like about my job: These weird problems that seem to come out of nowhere for no apparent reason, and that just as often disappear back into the void before I really understand what is going on. It can be oh-so frustrating at times, but I cannot deny that I am totally into weird things, so some part of me really enjoyed the whole experience.