Quotation Marks Don't Print Properly

You might try to print out a document and sometime notice that your quotation marks aren't printing out properly. Even though they may look fine on the screen, when you print they may come out as thick, dark # signs.

This problem could have a couple of causes. To understand the causes, it is good to understand how Word handles quotation marks. When you enter quotation marks in a document, they can be any of three different characters. The regular quotation mark has a character code of 34. However, if you have the Smart Quotes feature of Word turned on, the quotation marks could use character codes of 147 and 148, depending on whether it is an opening or closing quotation mark.

If your quotation marks are not printing properly, it is typically because the font being used does not have symbols associated with character codes 147 and 148. For instance, the Courier font does not have characters for these codes. When displaying the document on the screen, Word substitutes a screen font that displays the opening and closing quotation marks properly, but then when the document is printed, the printer font (Courier) does not have them, so it either skips them or substitutes a different symbol for the characters.

There are two potential solutions to this problem. The first is to simply change to a different font for your document. For instance, if your document uses Courier, you could switch to Courier New, which does have the proper quotation mark characters.

The second solution (which should be used if you don't want to change the font) is to turn off Smart Quotes. Turn off Smart Quotes in this manner:

1. Click the Office button, and then click Word Options. Word displays the Word Options dialog box.
2. Click Proofing at the left side of the dialog box, and then click AutoCorrect Options. Word displays the AutoCorrect dialog box.
3. Make sure the AutoFormat As You Type tab is displayed. (Click here to see a related figure.)
4. Make sure the Straight Quotes with Smart Quotes option is cleared.
5. Click on OK.

If the problem continues to exist, you may have a problem with your printer driver. In this case, you should visit the printer manufacturer's Web site and download the latest version of their printer driver.