I’m not in IT, but even I’ve solved a few doozies.
A couple techs were trying to send a particular file to a printer. NOTHING was working. Standard file format. Not very large. No weird fonts. Nothing complex in the file itself, like doubly embedded image files... So they call me.
“Have you tried changing the file name?”
“Change the file name???”
“There might be a character in it that the printer doesn’t like. Give it a super simple name, like ‘test’ with no caps.”
“Okay...”
File sails through.
...
Sometimes people wiill try to push a whole file through for an hour or so and get nothing without ever having tried to isolate the problem.
“The file won’t print!”
“Will it print _anything_ from the file?”
“No!”
“###... Okay, let me drive...”
I skim the document and see if there are simple pages to print. I do those to see if they’ll print. Then a batch of pages. Once I find the bum page, it’s usually something not built or set right. A bad font. A messed up table. a corrupt image file. An image that’s too complex... Making it right clears the log jam.
...
Fonts used to be a killer. One computer that crashing intermittently was set right by deleting forever a bad font from the user’s library...
“That’s one of my favorite fonts!”
“Replace it with the same thing from a reputable type foundry! This free knockoff you’re using will be the death of your computer!”
Of course, there were other pioneers in IT who tipped me to those solutions when I had run afoul of them myself... :-[
Okay. I named the file “test with no caps”.
Now it says the file name is too long.