Reluctant Printer

[clarion]

i have a Brother HL-5240 printer attached to my PC at work.  It's not brilliant, but it is reliable, and will churn out pages of stuff without complaint.

I had an odd problem today though.  I received a letter as an attachment to an email, as a word document.  I opened it & saved it to our shared drive.  Then I tried to print it.

Whatever I did, the printer decided it was out of paper as far as that letter was concerned.  Everything else was OK.

I don't understand, and nor does my IT lead.

Ideas?

[fred the great]

Brother Printers have a strange mind of their own. Mine refuses to print a web page regularly. I simply switch off the printer, reboot the Computer and it works again.

This has nothing to do with memory issues.

The Printer has just got it's knickers in a twist. If before the reboot I have tried two or three times to print the printer now tries to give me spare copies

My next Printer will be made by another Company!

[clarion]

I hadn't tried rebooting the PC - too busy.  Maybe it'll feel better tomorrow.  Strange it was just one document it objected to.

[TimO]

Is the paper size correct?

ie is the printer configured for A4, and the document for Letter (especially if it comes from the USA) ?  This will often cause the printer to complain that it's run out of paper, when what it really means is that it doesn't have any of that specific size of paper.

[clarion]

I wondered about that, but it's a template letter from the PCT, so almost certainly A4.  I will check, though (although it's not averse to printing an A4 payroll report on A5 payslips, I've found )

[fred the great]

And also check that the other Properties are correct. I have had problems in that area also.  Incidentally, if the paper feed on your Model does a U turn when printing don't try paper more than 180 gsm. It just refuses to load the paper

[Woofage]

I wondered about that, but it's a template letter from the PCT, so almost certainly A4.  I will check, though (although it's not averse to printing an A4 payroll report on A5 payslips, I've found )

Do check. It used to infuriate me that incompetent IT staff at my previous place of employment would incorrectly configure user s/w so US letter-size documents were often sent to the "corporate equivalent of the home video recorder"*, thus stalling it for the rest of the day until someone actually needed their hard copy .

* video recorders watch telly so you don't have to. Office printers do the same job for your documents, IME .