Text Formatting ⇒ Poor black text printing quality

[asims]

Dear all,

I hope this is the correct forum to post to.

I have a large double sided document (thesis) that is complete and now needs to be printed out at high quality.

I am using LaTeX > DVI > PS > PDF.

The document builds without error.

I have noticed on my draft prints that the black is not uniform on some of the text. I wonder if this is due to a colour mix trying to approximate black rather than using black toner/ink.

Could this be a difference between RGB and CMYK colours? I have only a cursory knowledge of this.

The document contains colour images (so could imagine that this may happen on a page with colour and text).

Is there a way to check if the correct font colours are used in the final document so that all text is printed with a pure black.

Regards

Andrew Sims
UNSW

[Stefan Kottwitz]

Hi Andrew,

the text should always be in black if you did not change the color. Perhaps it's a font issue, check if the correcz font was used. For example, a bitmap font could look fuzzy and lighter than a Type 1 font. An often occuring problem is, that a document uses T1 font encoding, which is recommendable, but the T1 supporting font is not installed. The standard Computer modern doesn't support T1, which can cause less quality, which can be fixed by installing the cm-super package or by using lmodern instead - Latin Modern is a very good alternative replacement for Computer Modern.

I know of further problems with displaying on screen, regarding quality and blackness, but as you mean draft prints, this should not be relevant. I would try another printer, another printer driver, another PDF programm for printing, and compare.

Stefan

[asims]

Thanks Stefan

I have the following already in my preamble:

Code: Select all

\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{lmodern}

I will have a look at printers etc.

How can I check that the font is installed? Is this through the MikTeX package manager?

The package LM (\fonts\outline fonts) has a date stamp in the "Installed on" column.

Thanks.

Andrew
UNSW