Printers Printing some PDFs as Garbage Characters

[John Five]

I administer a CUPS 1.2.4 install running on CentOS 5.2. Recently we've had people complain to our help desk that when they attempt to print some PDFs from Adobe Reader/Acrobat the printer spits out pages upon pages of what looks to be garbage characters (binary postscript?).

This is an extremely frustrating problem to debug. I can't figure out what is at fault here. Is it that Adobe is generating bad postscript? Are the drivers generating bad postscript? Is the printer not interpreting things correctly (firmware update required maybe?).

What options can I possibly tweak with CUPS to prevent this problem from happening? Whenever this happens tons of paper is wasted on printing garbage characters!

One way people have successfully worked around the problem is to use an alternate PDF reader, such as Foxit. Is it really Adobe that's spitting out bad postscript code? Or am I overlooking something in the way I have CUPS configured.

Any help with this problem would be much appreciated!

Note: I don't have the "Raw filter" enabled in mime.convs. Would enabling this fix my problem or at least mitigate?