Word not printing out black characters...

Hi, I have searched the only few halfway, but mostly unrelated topics about this and nothing has worked so far. Google searches have come up empty...
First, I have Office 2010 on a stock HP desktop (it is about 3 years old I guess) It had a retail copy of Office 2007 at first, fully activated. It was totally uninstalled and a  retail office 2010 installed, thinking this would fix the problem .. (a huge expense that was obviously unnecessary....) The printer is an older Lexmark X6710. Driver has been checked thru windows update and manufacturer site and is fine. There are no device conflicts showing. The printer ink is almost new, and I know it works 100% fine. 
 I say this because from every other source other than office applications, printing is perfect in black ink or in color. Even from a help topic in windows help and support, no problems. Test pages and web pages, perfect.
But when it comes to printing in Word, it is not going to happen. The documents come out as totally blank pages. The pages dont just roll out thru the printer, it acts like it is printing something on the paper, ...but nothing. Words show up fine in the preview page. I have chased my tail with supposed 'instant fix' 'check this box' dead end, shot in the dark options,... still have blank pages. 
The only way to get anything on paper is to change font color to anything but black. Color fonts, highlighted texts, anything else spits right out on paper just fine. But my business needs are normal black ink documents.

Please help, and soon, as I am on a desperate time crunch here.
By default, text color in Word is "Automatic," which should translate into black in most cases. If you test setting the color explicitly to "Black," does that improve the situation?
Stefan Blom
MS 365 Word MVP since 2005
Volunteer Moderator
MS 365, Win 11 Pro
~~~
Note that I do not work for Microsoft
https://mvp.microsoft.com/
~~~
Please specify Word version & OS in your question

3 people found this reply helpful

·

Was this reply helpful?

Sorry this didn't help.

Great! Thanks for your feedback.

How satisfied are you with this reply?

Thanks for your feedback, it helps us improve the site.

How satisfied are you with this reply?

Thanks for your feedback.

 
 

Question Info


Last updated April 2, 2023 Views 1,226 Applies to: