Printing special / extended characters on web page - Firefox or printer issue?

Question

My dad brought this to my attention and I'm looking into it, but thought I'd post here and see if anyone has any ideas...

He's running Win7, using Firefox and printing to a wireless connected Brother HL-2170W printer. He's got a web page (http://cornandsoybeandigest.com/inputs/fertilizer/applying-nitrogen-after-planting-0512/index.html) that has extended/special characters in it - the funny "a" in Fernandez. The characters show correctly in Firefox on the page. He printed it, and the extended "a" printed as a diamond with a question mark. He says it shows that way in the print preview, too.

I pulled up the same page in Ubuntu, Firefox, and it displayed in my print preview and physically printed everything correctly. I just checked on my wife's Win7 PC in Firefox and the print preview looked correct on her system, too. We have a Brother 2040 here.

Soooo, my question is, is this possibly a problem in the browser somehow, or the printer driver? I'm leaning towards the printer driver now, but I can't say I've run into this before. Is it a setting somewhere? I just installed this printer for him the other day, using the CD that came with it; I could try updating the driver from Brother's website I guess.

Is there anything else I should look at or check? Thanks!

Answer 1

such problems normally arrise, if the printer does not use a font which supports the glyphs needed by the text (a glyph is the optical symbol for a character, a font is a collection of glyphs).

the printer needs the data in a special format / language, which is mostly postscript. the more expensive and faster printers support this natively, the cheaper ones let the printer driver do the "translation" and then just print whats coming from the driver.

so, it's not quite clear, what happens on your dads printer. anyway, if the "translation" process is not able to get a glyph for the character it does not know how the character looks like. it has to come up with "something", in your case such a strange diamond.

you can test, if printing directly to a pdf and then printing that pdf helps. or if printing to an image and then printing to an image helps. for both tests you can use 'pdfcreator'.