Hmmmm... Not sure I am going to be a lot of help here, but I used to work
for HP and I am printing in a mixed environment currently
1) The HP can use HP PCL 6, HP PCL 5e, or Adobe PostScript
Level 2 emulation.
2) Many companies these days will install only the PCL driver unless you
ask for the PostScript one as well.
3) Either the PC or the Mac can print to either driver.
4) In most companies, the printer driver is actually resident in the Print
Server, not on the local computer. If you use this setup, chances are good
that both computers are using the same driver. But that's not guaranteed:
there is no reason that the print server cannot have both drivers available.
3) The print engine runs at 1200 dpi, so the problem is not the printer
Try this:
1) Create a new document. Make sure it contains at least one line of text.
2) Create a test graphic containing a black circle and some diagonal lines
(the acid test of resolution is to look for the "jaggies" in a straight but
sloping line). Make sure the graphic is small enough to fit on a page at
100 per cent of its size.
3) Save the graphic as a JPG file. Set the Quality to 100 per cent or
maximum. Make sure you save the graphic into the same folder on the network
as the document, where both the PC and the Mac can open it. This test tells
you nothing if you print the document from the local computer.
Follow the next two steps absolutely exactly...
4) Insert the graphic into the document using Insert>Picture>From File.
5) Check "Link to File" ON and make sure you check "Save with Document" to
OFF.
6) Make utterly sure you do not scale or resize the graphic in any way, or
crop it at all.
6) Print the file from the Mac
7) Print the same file from the PC
What this test does is eliminate Mac Word's habit of converting the JPEG to
a PICT when you paste it into the document.
If you paste into the document, Word saves two copies of the picture, one as
a PICT, the other as a JPEG. Under some circumstances, it will save a
third, as a bitmap. From the PC it will print the bitmap or the JPEG. From
the Mac it will print the PICT.
With the test graphic, Word will send uncompress the JPEG and send the
result directly to the printer driver as a raster (bitmap) without doing any
processing.
Chances are the results will now be identical.
What usually happens is that users who do not understand printing well
scale, crop, or adjust brightness and contrast on a picture within Microsoft
Word (because it is easy to do).
However, this calls on Word and the underlying computer to do some very
complicated mathematics to produce the printed result. Macs and PCs do not
approach floating point arithmetic in exactly the same way, and rounding
errors can occur.
There can also be a problem with screen grabs: older Macs run their screens
at 72 dots per inch. Modern Macs and PCs usually use 96 dpi.
And even in a single environment, the scaling of a picture can result in an
uneven match between the printer resolution and the picture. If you take a
picture at 96 dpi and scale it to 200 per cent of its size, you are asking
the printer to print it at 192 dpi. 192 divides into 1200 dpi 6.25 times,
meaning that the printer driver must multiply the number of pixels by six,
then add one for every 24.
That one pixel that is being "invented" can result in fuzzy graphics. If
you changed the scaling of the picture ever so slightly, the result would be
different. And chances are the copy from the Mac might be better than the
copy from the PC this time.
Fascinating stuff. Do I have an answer that is useful to you? Generally:
no.
Try to ensure that your JPEG originals are at a resolution high enough for
good printing. Generally 300 dpi is a practical minimum for colour, 600 dpi
for black-and-white. Commercial art bureaus tend to use 900 dpi or better.
2400 dpi is a nice round number, but at that resolution you are using up
some very serious amounts of disk space and processing power. You are also
outstripping the genuine (optical) resolution capability of most scanners
and cameras. Many devices "claim" to be able to achieve 4800 dpi, but
unless you paid many thousands of dollars for one, they do it by multiplying
pixels. The result is not a "sharper" picture, it's a fat bloated file that
still looks fuzzy!
Hope this helps
My colleagues and I work on a mix of Macs and PCs with Word (Word X, 2004 on
the Mac and Word 2000 on the PC). If we have photographs (jpgs) which are
inserted into Mac Word and PC Word and then printed to our HP 4000 laser
printers, the printed photographs are sharper when printed from Word on the
PC.
Is this a Word Mac problem or Postscript rastering problem on the HP? Do
PC's print to the HP printer using PS or do they use the HP printer
language?
Does anybody have experience printing to a brand of laser printer from Macs
and PCs that does not have this problem?
--
Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.
John McGhie <
[email protected]>
Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 4 1209 1410
