Word 2001 Pixelated Printing

[Andrew Spear]

I have several embedded images in a Word 2001 file, when I try to print they
come out very pixelated, even if they were fairly large files before
importing and they look fine on screen. I have not stretched the images to
a larger size once in Word, in fact they are a lot smaller.

Is it possible there is some low res image printing option somewhere?

Thanks

 

[Andy]

In Word X the only thing I can think of is on the actual print dialog
box -- which intersects with the printer's own software. My laser
printer needs to be cranked up to 1200dpi for good greyscale handling
and also has a specialist graphics mode which helps out. But what
kind of images in what format are you printing to what kind of
printer? With more info. I may be able to make some suggestions.

 

[Candrias]

I am using a Brother 1440 b&w laser printer at 600x600 dpi resolution.
The images I import are around 800 pixels wide in jpeg format
(72dpi). In Word they look fine and I scale them down to about 1/3 of
their original size then try to print and they look terible. The
fonts and other elements on the page look fine, it is just the
imported images.

If I try to print to pdf I get the same problem.

I am using Word 2001 as part of Office 2001 on Mac OS 9.2.2.

Any help would be much appreciated, thanks.

 

[Andy]

Yeah, but what kind of images are they: graphics or photographs or
what?

Laser printers often make a mess of greyscale or colour graphics. Is
it possible to use B+W (just double click on the image and change the
mode to B+W (1-bit bitmap) -- but this will make photos look awful).
The reason is that lasers can only actually print black or white -- so
to render greyscale they make a grid of their black and white pixels
to render one grey (or blue or whatever) "screen" pixel in a mixture
of black and white to give the impression of the shade seen from the
distance. So the effective resolution is way below the 600dpi --
which is why it's worth (if you can) cranking it up higher even to
print lowish resolution images. Make sense?

So your best bet may be to make them B+W or use an ink jet!!

About PDF, I did once read that printing to PDF from within Word _is_
stuck on low resolution -- and I seem to remember there was no getting
out of it...

But it all depends on what kind of images they actually are... (more
info and I'll try again)

Cheers, Andy