[softwarelist] Re: Printing OPW and PDF files containing 1bpp TIFFs (sprites)

David Pilling wrote:
In message <44E4B7B5.7080708@xxxxxxxx>, Clive Bonsall <C.Bonsall@xxxxxxxx> writes
However, when I printed the same document to paper from the PDF file, the WHITE areas of the pictures appeared as a faint banded grey tone ... as tho' someone had shaded over the white background of the picture very lightly with a stick of charcoal in a horizontal motion.

First thing that springs to mind - screening. When you're printing to Distiller you're printing to a PostScript printer.

The key thing then is if "Direct PostScript" is selected in OPW Print choices. 

It wasn't selected.

I'm assuming you are driving your Laser Jet via PCL and not via PostScript which is often an option. 

via the PCL6 driver.

After much playing around, I think I've narrowed it down to the HP printer driver settings. I normally drive the printer via PCL, using FastRes 1200 with HP MEt selected for complex graphics (whatever all that means).

Switching from FastRes 1200 to ProRes 1200 (141 lpi) (with the same graphics setting) gets rid of the charcoal stick effect in the white areas of pictures. However, a thin line (aaaarrrgh ...!) then appears in the printout along the bottom and right-hand edges of certain pictures.

On the other hand, if I drive the printer using the HPlj 1200ps driver, then (when printing from the PDF file) neither the "charcoal stick" nor the "thin lines along picture edges" effects are visible ... so far, anyway.

The reason I was concerned about all this in the first place is that, eventually, I have to send my OPW documents to a publisher/printer as a series of PDF files, and obviously don't want the quality of the pictures to be compromised by the kinds of effects visible in some of the HP lj1220 print-outs.
--
CB

Other related posts: