I'm trying to print a word document that has many Microsoft equation 3.0
elements (discrete mathematics summaries). The print comes out with question
marks instead of the mathematical symbols I entered in the document. How do
I solve this problem?
Thank you.

On 7-Jul-2005, Gur Dotan wrote:

I'm trying to print a word document that has many Microsoft
equation 3.0 elements (discrete mathematics summaries). The
print comes out with question marks instead of the mathematical
symbols I entered in the document.

It's not clear from your post, but is the entire equation replaced with a
single question mark, or are certain symbols within each equation being
replaced with individual question marks? If the latter, it's a font issue.
Either you have a corrupted Symbol font, or your font specification in
Equation Editor is incorrect. With Equation Editor open, click on Define in
the Style menu. These 3 styles must be set to Symbol font: Symbol, L.C.
Greek, U.C. Greek.

If each equation is being replaced with a single question mark, it's most
likely a printer driver problem. Make sure you have the latest printer
driver from the printer manufacturer's web site.

I'm assuming the equations look fine on the monitor, since you specified the
problem occurs when you print them.

--
Bob Mathews bobm at dessci.com
Director of Training
http://www.dessci.com/free.asp?free=news
FREE fully-functional 30-day evaluation of MathType 5
Design Science, Inc. -- "How Science Communicates"
MathType, WebEQ, MathPlayer, MathFlow, Equation Editor, TeXaide

[kbenoit]

Originally Posted by Bob Mathews

On 7-Jul-2005, Gur Dotan wrote:

I'm trying to print a word document that has many Microsoft
equation 3.0 elements (discrete mathematics summaries). The
print comes out with question marks instead of the mathematical
symbols I entered in the document.

It's not clear from your post, but is the entire equation replaced with a
single question mark, or are certain symbols within each equation being
replaced with individual question marks? If the latter, it's a font issue.
Either you have a corrupted Symbol font, or your font specification in
Equation Editor is incorrect. With Equation Editor open, click on Define in
the Style menu. These 3 styles must be set to Symbol font: Symbol, L.C.
Greek, U.C. Greek.

If each equation is being replaced with a single question mark, it's most
likely a printer driver problem. Make sure you have the latest printer
driver from the printer manufacturer's web site.

I'm assuming the equations look fine on the monitor, since you specified the
problem occurs when you print them.

--
Bob Mathews bobm at dessci.com
Director of Training
http://www.dessci.com/free.asp?free=news
FREE fully-functional 30-day evaluation of MathType 5
Design Science, Inc. -- "How Science Communicates"
MathType, WebEQ, MathPlayer, MathFlow, Equation Editor, TeXaide

This thread is old, but I'm having the same trouble and traced it down a bit. I see 2 problems with printing equations. Printing equation prints blank characters instead of real formula and printing equations prints question marks instead of real question marks.

Both problems does not show in print preview (print preview looks fine), but only when printed. Printing to a PDF does the same, good to save paper and footsteps when testing

The first problem, printing blank characters instead of symbols, happens only on a page where an image in inserted. The rest of the document is printed correctly. The problem seems to be with png file format, the solution is to convert the image to jpg or bmp before insertion in the document.

The second, which I was not able to track all the way down, is AFAIU related to some software corruption. The whole document get its equations printed with idividual characters printed as question mark. Since the problem showed up, no document containing equations are printable correctly anymore.

I work in college so I tried other computers and have the same result so I tried removing "localsettings/applicationdata/microsoft/office", "applicationdata/microsoft/office" and "applicationdata/word" with no success. I switched to another user on the same computer and have the same result. But I sent the document to a member of the staff here and she was able to print it correctly.

She might not have logout/in for a while and could be related to a software update or perhaps my user account corrupt the local settings on the computer ?

There seems to be other people with the same trouble, but no one seems to have tracked it down. I'm kind of new to word and dont know to much about patches and revisions, is there an update to word that fix this problem I can suggest to the tech here ? By the way it's word 2007 (12.0.6425.1000) SP2.

I attached a docx and the printed result, the extension docx was refused and is renamed to doc.