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Office 2010 printing errors with Calibri font: an alternative

  • Article

 

This blog post presents an alternative solution to the issue described in the KB article 2592142.

 

Symptom

Consider the following scenario:

Client computers that print through a print server using Windows Server 2003 or Windows Server 2008 as a platform may encounter printing errors or incorrect output when they have an Office 2010 application installed.

Error messages or results:

a) Invalid font errors
b) Missing print jobs
c) Secure print fails

Cause

This behavior occurs because the version of the font installed on the print server does not match the version on the client that has an Office 2010 application installed. This appears to apply specifically to the Calibri font.

The scenario is described in the following KB article:

 

Office 2010 printing errors with Calibri font when printing through a Windows Server 2003 or 2008 print server

https://support.microsoft.com/kb/2592142

Solution

 

The mentioned article suggests one of the following options:

Option 1: Install Office 2010 fonts on the print servers (recommended)
Option 2: Bypass the print servers and print directly to the printers
Option 3: Use an alternative to the Calibri font

 

In case that options 2 and 3 are not applicable in your environments, either because of performance reasons (option 2) or legal constraints or organizational rules that force you to keep the Calibri font in your documents (option 3), option 1 remains the only valid alternative.

The recommended way to implement option 1 is to install the Office 2010 from an Office 2010 installation source by performing a custom install of Office and install only fonts under shared components.

This approach however requires that you enter the product key and activate Office 2010 it even if you only install the fonts. Otherwise the installation is in an unsupported state. Another aspect of this approach is that you need to have a valid license available in order to implement the solution.

Alternative

Install PowerPoint viewer, freely available at the following address:

PowerPoint Viewer

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=13

Benefits of this approach:

- successfully installs the Calibri font, thus solving the issue

- activation is not needed.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Hi Victor, sorry for the delay of my answer. As Windows XP/2003 is currently in extended support, no further updates are developed and provided. If I understand correctly, a Windows Server update brings a more recent version of the font than Office installation or PowerPoint viewer. You may want to look at the other 2 workarounds mentioned in the KB2592142. Also, I would advice you to open a support ticket, so that Microsoft can look deeper into the issue based on the specific environment that you have in place.

  • Anonymous
    May 02, 2013
    Thank you for this alternative.  However, it did not work in our case; printouts are still occasionally missing character combinations such as "tt".  We have a Windows Server 2008 R2 print server and Windows XP/2003 clients with Office 2010 installed.  Looks like Windows Server 2008 R2 ships with a newer version of Calibri (5.72) than Office 2010 (5.62) and the PowerPoint Viewer and Office 2010 do not downgrade the version.  Is it OK to downgrade the version of Calibri on the print server?

  • Anonymous
    May 02, 2013
    After further research, I found that the updated version of Calibri is installed by the KB2761217 patch, which only applies to Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7.  Is there a similar patch for Windows XP/2003 that will update the version of Calibri to 5.72?  If not, can you recommend some possible solutions?

  • Anonymous
    February 14, 2014
    Missing letter is fixed by the following hotfix http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2642020