Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Word versions: 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, Word in Microsoft 365, and 2021. If you are using an earlier version (Word 2003 or earlier), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for earlier versions of Word, click here: Automatic Font Color Won't Print Properly.
Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated April 6, 2024)
This tip applies to Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, Word in Microsoft 365, and 2021
Alan notes that his Word documents all come out blank when he prints them on the printer. The only way he can get them to print properly is to select all the text in the document, display the Font dialog box, and change the font color from Automatic to black. Alan is wondering why the Automatic color in Word results in invisible text when printing and how he can fix the problem.
There are two possibilities, and both of them have to do not with Word, but with your printer driver.
The first and most likely possibility is that you have a printer driver that has a glitch in it. You should make sure that you visit the Web site of your printer's manufacturer and see if there is an update available for the printer driver. If so, download it and install it to see if the problem goes away.
The second possibility is that the printer driver has some internal setting that results in the behavior you are seeing. Press Ctrl+P to display the Print dialog box (Word 2007) or the printing options on the File tab of the ribbon (Word 2010 and later versions). Click the Properties button (Word 2007) or the Printer Properties link (Word 2010 and later versions). The resulting dialog box allows you to explore the printer settings. Your printer driver controls all these settings, and you may discover one that is resulting in the behavior you note. This will require some trial-and-error poking about, so make sure that you have time to spend with the exploration.
WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (11673) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, Word in Microsoft 365, and 2021. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Word here: Automatic Font Color Won't Print Properly.
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2024-04-09 11:02:35
Paul Stregevsky
Fascinating story, Dean Cardno. I'm impressed that you, or your team, managed to figure out what was causing that problem.
In the 1990s, I was a technical writer on a team that used FrameMaker. When we needed to convert a FrameMaker file to a PDF file, we were told to follow Adobe's guidance: "For best results, use Acrobat Distiller--not the PDFMaker plug-in."
But Distiller rendered our company logo, NEC, as its mirror image: backward C, then backward E, then backward N. PDFMaker rendered it right.
So I would print my user guide in Distiller, then use Acrobat to replace its cover page with a cover page that I had rendered in PDFMaker.
2024-04-06 11:49:04
Dean Cardno
There is another possibility. I work at a company named XYZ Hydro, and company style is that the the name not be split across two lines, so we use a non-breaking. To type the company name we type "XYZ" then Ctrl-Shift-Space then "Hydro." If your two hands are not quite in sync, "Hydro" starts as Ctrl-Shift-H, then "ydro" - Word understands that Ctrl-Shift-H means "enter hidden text" - and everything that follows will appear on screen, but will not print. It's a problem specific to words that start with "H" - but it could happen to a hardware store, or haberdashery, if they have the same "non-breaking" rule about their name!
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Please Note:
This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Word versions: 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, Word in Microsoft 365, and 2021. If you are using an earlier version (Word 2003 or earlier), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for earlier versions of Word, click here:
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