With technology, you never know what the next problem is. As advanced as it gets, you will still experience annoying changes, updates, and printers printing gibberish.
At that point, you can only follow the recommended solutions and hope they help, as most people never indeed find out what caused the issue, only what tends to fix it.
Here’s how to solve printer printing gibberish.
What Causes A Printer To Print Gibberish?
To print out what you want them to, printers have to communicate with your PC or laptop, usually through wires or networks.
If your printer keeps printing gibberish, and you’re not sure why this happens, it is almost always a problem in communication.
It is either faulty wires, encrypted networks, drivers that don’t match, updates that don’t match, damaged ports, possible network errors, and more.
How To Fix My Printer That Prints Gibberish?
Solution 1 – Restart
We know most people make fun of this solution. Still, restarting your printer, network adapter, and laptop/PC is sometimes the solution to our problems by deleting the cache in RAM that seems to be creating a misunderstanding.
If your network printer prints gibberish, this might be very helpful.
Solution 2 – Troubleshoot
Sometimes, when a printer prints one line of gibberish with each document, there is simply a small misunderstanding that is a result of errors in the code of one device or another.
Opening up the list of printers, usually in Control Panel → Devices and Printers allows you to right-click and troubleshoot.
Solution 3 – Drivers
If one of the two devices has troubled drivers, the communication cannot be executed appropriately.
By visiting the manufacturer’s website, you can check what are the latest drivers for your printer and install them. Entering Device Manager through Start allows you to right-click a printer and Update the driver.
This might fix the problem of your HP printer printing one line of gibberish.
Solution 4 – Clear the Queue
Sometimes, the printer is confused as we gave it orders, but we never followed through, and there have been errors on the way.
Through Start, enter the Control Panel and then Hardware and Sound, as well as Printers and Devices. Double click the printer and cancel all jobs.
Solution 5 – Print Differently
It often happens that specific software’s interpretation of a particular document isn’t the correct one.
The encryption doesn’t fit, and that is why your printer prints one line of gibberish each time.
Try to open the document in another software that supports the same file type, and print from there to see whether any changes occur.
Solution 6 – Make It A PDF
Why is my printer printing squares instead of letters? If you’re trying to print a Word document, a PowerPoint, or something similar and your printer prints random characters, try to save that document as a PDF.
You can do this by going to File → Save As → File type: PDF. Sometimes the font encryption does not work the way it is supposed to, which is why this gibberish happens.
Final Thoughts
Your printer printing gibberish is not a rare problem, and this happens quite a lot with various errors and communication problems that can occur.
