trouble printing on fibrous paper

[SEB106]

I recently switched to a Mac and am having trouble printing colors on
fibrous paper (e.g., linen business stationary) on my HP all-in-one
from Microsoft Word for Mac. The colors are not as crisp and vibrant
as when printed from my PC. The HP website suggests increasing the ink
volume, but this feature does not seem to be available on the Mac
version of Word. Any suggestions?

 

[CyberTaz]

The truth is it has little, if anything, to do with Word on the PC or the
Mac. The program simply hands the information off to the printer via the
printer driver. Word - in particular - does absolutely nothing with regard
to color management.

What HP *didn't* tell you is that their driver for OS X is evidently not as
robust as their driver for Windows ... or else the tech you talked to
knows little about where to adjust printer settings on a Mac. Depending on
the specific colors involved, it could posibly be attributable to the
differences in how color is handled by the two operating systems.

If there is any kind of 'ink volume adjustment' or other type of control it
is the function of the printer driver. Should there be any such setting
you'll find it in the Print dialog (3rd list from the top) among the other
features of the printer.

 

[Elliott Roper]

I recently switched to a Mac and am having trouble printing colors on
fibrous paper (e.g., linen business stationary) on my HP all-in-one
from Microsoft Word for Mac. The colors are not as crisp and vibrant
as when printed from my PC. The HP website suggests increasing the ink
volume, but this feature does not seem to be available on the Mac
version of Word. Any suggestions?

1. Try eliminating Word by testing in another application, like
TextEdit. Or perhaps by printing to PDF and then printing the result
with Preview.app

2. To get the best results you should set up colour profiles for your
printer (and scanner and any other input and display devices) It is a
black art. As a starting point, choose sRGB using the colorsync
application for your monitors and whatever hp says is a good thing for
your printer and paper combination. If you can't find anything, I think
you should choose sRGB again; don't be misled by the CMYK colour
cartridges, those multi-function thingys trick themselves into
pretending they are RGB devices to make things easy for us peasants.

Note that the commonly/previously accepted gamma value for Macintosh is
lower than that normally used for PC. Ditto white point used to be a
lower temperature. It is pretty pointless these days. PCs have won.
That might explain why things start off looking washed out. You fix it
by playing with the profiles till you are happy. For added credit,
calibrate your displays from System Preferences » Displays » colour.
Take a deep breath and click expert mode. (when you get the chance,
choose PC gamma (2.2) and D56 white point). It won't directly make your
print any better, but it will make your screen look a bit more like the
print, and, if you ever send the doc to a PC, the recipient won't think
it is all washed out.

Linen paper is always tricky. You might spend many a happy hour at the
Apple help and web site and with the printer profiles from hp.

Hp should provide profiles for each type of paper that your printer
supports. My printer (non-hp) is sadly lacking in profiles for Mac.

If all fails, when you come to print your document, play with the
colorsync options in the print dialog to be found by clicking on the
third unlabelled dialog (it usually rests at "copies and pages")

I think your problem might be solved by choosing "lightness decrease"
from there.

 

[ruthlesslightning]

To follow up on Bob's suggestion, I would recommend going to System
Preferences, Print & Fax, and click on your printer. Then, click on
"Printer Setup." If there's any kind of color management utility or
quality management, it should come up there.

As an ex-Apple tech, I will tell you that not all the printer company's
proprietary utilities run as well on an Intel based Mac as they do on a
PPC; not all of the utilities have been re-written for the Mac.

That's my 2 cents. HTH.
Cheers,
Geoff Lilley
Microsoft Office Master Instructor (2000/XP)
Apple Certified HelpDesk Specialist (OS X 10.4)

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

The feature is available on my HP PSC 2510.

But you have to be running the HP software on your Mac. You don't need the
HP software to print, but you DO for advanced things such as changing the
ink volume.

The instructions for doing this are in your HP printer manual.

Cheers

I recently switched to a Mac and am having trouble printing colors on
fibrous paper (e.g., linen business stationary) on my HP all-in-one
from Microsoft Word for Mac. The colors are not as crisp and vibrant
as when printed from my PC. The HP website suggests increasing the ink
volume, but this feature does not seem to be available on the Mac
version of Word. Any suggestions?

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Business Analyst, Consultant
Technical Writer.
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410