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email not printing as displayed. Characters missing or substituted for square dots

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  • Last reply by Matt

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Emails not printing correctly from Thunderbird (Supernova 115.3.1, Mac High Sierra 10.13.6). Text only emails print correctly, most of the time. Any email that has graphics, was generated by a form or Adobe acrobat does not print as it appears on screen. Characters are missing or replaced by tiny square dots. Fonts and sizes are changed. It does not matter if it is printed directly from Thunderbird, saved as a pdf, print through the system dialog, opened in preview, etc. Please see examples. One is a screen capture of the email, the other is a screen capture of the print output.

The work around so far is to take multiple screen shots which is not satisfactory. What am I missing? Please help. Thanks

Emails not printing correctly from Thunderbird (Supernova 115.3.1, Mac High Sierra 10.13.6). Text only emails print correctly, most of the time. Any email that has graphics, was generated by a form or Adobe acrobat does not print as it appears on screen. Characters are missing or replaced by tiny square dots. Fonts and sizes are changed. It does not matter if it is printed directly from Thunderbird, saved as a pdf, print through the system dialog, opened in preview, etc. Please see examples. One is a screen capture of the email, the other is a screen capture of the print output. The work around so far is to take multiple screen shots which is not satisfactory. What am I missing? Please help. Thanks
Attached screenshots

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Going back about a million years (it feels like it) Pdf was based on the Adobe postscript printer language, basically a vector based page layout language. So I am guessing that the issue is likely that the PDF's use a font that is simply not available on your device and is not embedded in the PDF. While it is not as common as 20 years ago, there are still font issues.

Usually when the squares instead of text, or even inverted question marks appear it is the font being used by the printer is not a UniCode font but the one in the document is.

The discussion on the apple forums would indicate others have encountered very similar issues and are being told similar things to what I have been saying. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252963069?sortBy=best and https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1085137?sortBy=best