Gray text with color laser printers

rbuser

With the recent spreading of advanced color laser printers, I have seen a
weird problem with RB reports:

If a page contains one or more color images (BMP or JPG), any ordinary black
text on the same page will degrade in quality. It seems RB or the printer
converts the whole page to graphics....or the printer combines several
colors to make black, instead of printing real black.

So the page goes into some "color mode", and the text appears gray-ish in
those pages. As opposed to perfectly black text in those pages that have no
graphics.

Recently I have seen this behavior with these printers:
-Oki 7200
-Minolta Dialta Color CF 2002
-Tektronix PHASER 850

It seems to help to toggle the "direct to printer" property for the
graphics. However this can introduce new problems (with the Minolta the
graphics will disappear).

Now the really embarrassing thing is that using Microsoft Word, one can
combine text and graphics without this problem. So it seems to be an
RB-specific problem.

Using RB6, D6, Windows XP.

--

Mvh/regards
Svein Olav Mytting
Bogstadvn 60A, 0366 Oslo

digitalmetaphors

The first step should be downloading the latest printer drivers for these
printers and retesting.

There are different Win API calls that can be made to print to a printer. No
doubtedly, when the printer drivers are "tested" they test using the major
Windows apps (Word, Excel...) to see if they can print. RB is most likely
using different (although valid) Win API calls than the other Windows apps
when printing. We are currently researching the issue to see if there is a
better way to print in order to support even more printer drivers.


Cheers,

Jim Bennett
Digital Metaphors