White graphic prints gray

[jsandstormer]

I maintain a document which includes over a hundred screen captures
that include large areas of white space. I recently upgraded to Office
2003. I just printed this document for the first time since the
upgrade, and discovered that all the white areas are printing light
gray and look terrible.

I found this article on Microsoft's site:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/908021/en-us?spid=2522&sid=72

Unfortunately the "solution" is to convert all of the graphics to
another format and then re-insert them. Also, half of my screen
captures were actually pasted directly from the clipboard, so there are
no files to convert.

I was supposed to create PDFs today and send them out to a printer, but
we would be embarrassed to send out our manuals looking like this.

Is there some other way around this? A patch or something?
Is there a quick way to roll back to the previous version of Word?

This is a significant problem for us. Thanks!

 

[J.]

Just to clarify... looks like I am actually using Word 2002, so I'm not
sure if I'm using a never version than before or not. And when I pasted
screen captures in from the clipboard, I pasted them as bitmaps. (In
retrospect, that may have been a bad idea!) However, most of the screen
captures are not new... only this white-prints-as-light-gray thing is
new.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

You might experiment with increasing the brightness just a bit. Test-print
one graphic and see if that helps. If it does, you can either ask for a
macro to apply the same setting to all the graphics or you can set your
browse object to Graphic (if they're inline) and, after changing the setting
in Format Picture for one graphic, click through all the rest with the
browse buttons and F4 (repeat) on each one.

 

[Jezebel]

And before you go very far, also check what it looks like in a PDF.
Acrobat's handling of Word graphics is sometimes idiosyncratic.

 

[J.]

And before you go very far, also check what it looks like in a PDF.
Acrobat's handling of Word graphics is sometimes idiosyncratic.

It looked the same in Acrobat as in Word (i.e. white), and printed the
same in both (i.e. grey). This made me suspicious of my printer driver.
I switched from a PCL driver to a PS driver, and my problem was solved!

Thanks to both of you!