My Printer Is Not Printing Certain Lines & Dots

by Elizabeth Mott

Your business depends on its output hardware for critical documents and presentations, so flaws in your printed materials mean wasted ink, toner and paper, not to mention work time diverted from company tasks to equipment troubleshooting. Some flaws produce extra lines and markings on the page, whereas others result in unprinted areas where text or graphics should appear. If your pages show text characters with parts of their letter forms missing or other output defects, start your detective work with your printing supplies and printing path.


Inkjet printers can develop clogged cartridges that cause defects in their output, including voids within lines of text. These problems often show up after your hardware sits idle for periods of time, which can cause ink to dry out. To resolve this, use the printhead cleaning routine, which you can access from within the control software you installed on your computer when you first set up the printer. Some devices include both light and deep cleaning modes. In cases of severe clogging, you may need to run more than one cycle to eradicate the problem. Because these procedures use ink, expect your usable levels to drop after you finish your cleaning sequence.

Printhead Alignment

When inkjet printheads fall out of alignment, you may see gaps in the output that result from misapplication of ink. Just as you resolve clogs with cleaning cycles, you use your printer's built-in alignment routine to correct printhead problems. You may need to print a test page, identify the best exemplar from each of several batches of output samples, and key-in corresponding sample numbers to complete the alignment procedure.

Laser Cartridges

Laser printers can produce stray lines on their output when the drum that images each page sustains a scratch. Some laser printers place the drum inside the toner cartridge, whereas other hardware designs use separate consumables for toner and drum. Defective cartridges can also produce voids in printed output. Before you start troubleshooting hardware features such as the fuser that bonds toner onto paper, swap out your toner cartridge or cartridges to rule them out as the cause of your output defects.

Dirty LEDs

LED printers operate very similarly to the way other toner-based printers image pages, but with a bank of LEDs as the output method's light source instead of a laser. If paper dust, stray toner or other contaminants obscure the LEDs, output suffers because the printer can't apply toner where it belongs to produce the page detail featured in your document. To tidy up your hardware, wipe its printheads with a clean, lint-free cloth.

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