Re: M401dn - printing problems with Adobe

Printer: LaserJet Pro M401dn
Connection: USB
OS: Windows XP Pro SP3
Applications: Acrobat Pro 9.5, Reader XI, MS Word 2003

I apparently have the same problem.  I’m using the device-specific PCL 6 driver, which is what I want for most applications.  If I print single sided, all the text—including the page footer—aligns at the top of the page; I assume this is the same white-space compression to which the OP referred.  If I print double sided, the text—including the page header— aligns at the bottom of the page.  Either is simply unacceptable for any professional correspondence.

The problem does not occur when printing directly from Microsoft Word.  But of course this workaround is not available for a document that I haven’t created.

I did not have this problem with the PCL 6 driver for the LaserJet 2100 that I just replaced.

I took Kevin Adams’s suggestion (thanks!) and tested printing from the printer’s USB port.  If I print a PDF from that port, the problem does not occur; however, if I print to file and print the resulting prn file from the printer’s USB port, the problem occurs as before.  This suggests that the problem is in the driver rather than the printer’s firmware.

PS UPD
HP support suggested using the PS UPD, which I downloaded and finally managed to install after guessing at the process.  It seems to correct the problem, but it’s mighty sluggish, taking 50–60 seconds to open a Properties dialog from the Printers and Faxes window (with the device- specific PCL 6 driver, it takes about 4 seconds).  And printing performance is sometimes astonishingly slow—I tried printing a document I had scanned into PDF; printing took less than two seconds with the PCL 6 driver, but almost a minute and a half with the PS UPD. The scanned document wasn’t especially large—about 92 kB—so there is something seriously wrong with the PS UPD.  Although the UPD has many features useful in a large enterprise, it seems mighty unwieldy, and seems like overkill for a small business.  In any event, it seems to have enough quirks that it’s not an acceptable solution to the problem.

I’m not certain that I correctly installed the PS UPD—suffice it to say that the installation instructions leave much to be desired.  The UPD System Administrator’s Guide is comprehensive, but it seems to omit some obvious basics.  Can the PS UPD and device-specific PCL 6 driver coexist on the same printer?  If so, what is the installation procedure?  The SysAdmin Guide says precious little about installation with a USB connection, and the procedure described does not work with Windows XP (which lacks pnputil).  Plug-and-play detection probably wouldn’t work anyway with the device-specific PCL 6 driver already installed.  I ended up with a manual installation using the USB003 virtual printer port, which is also used by the printer instance that used the PCL 6 driver (ports USB001 and USB002 are used by other non-HP printers).

Any suggestions?  Quite honestly, the inability of the default driver to properly print what’s probably the most common document distribution format is a pretty serious problem.  And I find it surprising that there has apparently been no progress in four months.