Microsoft Word pdf/Adobe Reader print issues

If these PDFs were printed at FedEx, would it not be a function of the print drivers used at FedEx that could be introducing the graphical aberrations? What happens when you print these PDFs on your own printers with the current print drivers for Monterey?

You should be using the print icon on the Adobe Reader toolbar as that is their print facility. If you use the File > Print facility, that is Apple's and may not print the PDF the same as Adobe would treat that output. Worth a try.

I think of Adobe Acrobat Reader DC as the gold standard for current PDF document support, and less so Apple's Preview application which is built on a foundation of an older PDF specification.

I just opened an existing text-based .docx in Word 16.65 and save it to a PDF on my Desktop. Microsoft is using Apple's Quartz PDF Context when saving as PDF, as do Apple applications, so I would expect that PDF to be well-behaved in Preview, but just as well, in the Adobe software too.

Also just heard back from the guy we were working with at Fedex. He was able to use the Word doc and create a pdf file from their Windows system that printed correctly. This sounds like a Microsoft Word on Mac issue....urrrr! I thought Microsoft and Apple played together better in their sandbox nowadays.

BTW I did try printing the Word doc to PDF and that didn't print correctly either. Looks fine on screen.

That sounds like whatever Word is using to rasterize the document is broken.

Try opening the Word doc in Pages and try printing to PDF. Some formatting won’t be perfect, but if the images all appear in the right place, not cut off, you can isolate it to Word if you want to take it up with Microsoft.

Let's see if macOS 12.6 and Word v16.65 do this right, or if the issue remains. Expect 12.6 this week…

And the FedEx people may have opened your Word document in Adobe Acrobat Pro DC and converted it to PDF that way. Check with them about their approach.

Word v16.65 does not use its own commercial PDF library, but rather, borrows Apple's Quartz PDF context library to generate the PDF. That, not Word itself, could be the source of the PDF printing issue.

Do the PDF files look OK when viewed by Adobe Reader? If so try printing to PDF from Adobe Reader and see if the new pdf file will print correctly.

I am out of ideas, Deb. 😞