picture toolbar - images blurred-word 2000

[John Smith]

Hello all.

Word 2000 on Windows 2000 machine.

I do a 300 page manual in word 2000 that has hundreds of b&w linedrawings.
All are 600 dpi b&w bitmaps. When I print to Distiller, the drawings are
getting blurred (grayscale). Not a lot, in fact you have to zoom in to
1600% on the PDF to see it, but it does not look good when it is printed on
a web press. This is some kind of optimization happening automatically I
guess. Anyway, in trying to fix it, I can click on an image, go to the
PICTURES toolbar, reset the image to B&W from AUTOMATIC, save and print it,
and I get seemingly random results. Same thing if I double-click the image
and use the FORMAT PICTURE dialog. BTW, even if an image prints incorrectly
as a grayscale image, it still shows as Black&White in the image control
settings.

A typical page has 12 drawings, if reset all 12 images to b&w, then maybe 4
(random)will print without the blurring and the rest will have it. I've
tried turning off update links, re-inserting the drawing, etc. Some pages
print totally correct, some do not. All docs are based on the same templates
too.

Anyway, are there other settings I can try to get rid of this problem? Any
way to change the default "Automatic" setting in the picture toolbar to
"Black & White" (perhaps a registry setting). For that matter, what exactly
is happening when the setting is "Automatic".

Thanks

Dennis

 

[John Smith]

OK, I found the work-around.....

I forgot to mention that the 12 b&w drawings were in a table for alignment
purposes. I found that if a drawing overlapped a cell boundary, including
the (adjustable) cell margin, then that (b&w) drawing will be converted to a
grayscale image when printed. Not really a bug, but just the way it is. I
know it seems that one might be more careful, but these line drawing are use
in many other documents and usually include a lot of whitespace around the
perimeters, so I was sizing them for the best appearance, and not paying
attention to the fact that some of the whitespace overlapped the cell
boundary. For screen viewing or printouts, it was great, but not for
commercial printing.