Diagnosing Printing Problems

Black and White Printers

When Windows prints color images such as the Plot View on a black and white printer the colors must be converted to shades of gray. The various shades may be light or dark, solid or grainy. The resulting printout quality will depend upon a number of things.

• DeedMapper's View Options settings. Line thicknesses, font sizes, color selections and so on are controlled from the View Options dialog box.

• Your printer and its capabilities.

• Your printer's driver software (provided by the manufacturer). This critical software component interprets drawing commands from Windows and expresses them in the proper way for the particular printer. Mapping of colors to black and white is also performed by the printer driver, that is, it is responsible for figuring out how your printer will show yellow or any other color. Errors in the driver software can mean that certain drawing functions won't work properly. This is particularly common for new printer models. All printer manufacturers make the latest versions of their drivers available for free downloading from their web site.

• Your current Page Settings on the File print dialog box. The settings are information for the printer driver (see above). They define whether the page is to be printed in portrait or landscape mode, the size of paper to be printed on, and most importantly, via the Printer button, how the colors are to be converted to black and white. Halftoning and dithering are two techniques that are used to interpret colors in black and white.

Symptom	Remedy
Faint or non-existent printing of maps, parcels, text	The color being printed is being converted to white or to a shade of pale gray. Try using the View Options dialog to change the color of the item in question to something that will print darker. Also try modifying your Print Setup to disable halftoning and/or dithering, or to try different settings.
Lines on parcels	See above. Make sure the View Options settings specify black as the color for the plot lines.
Fuzzy annotations	See above.
Text is too small	Use the View Options dialog to change the font size

Color Printers

The comments under Black and White Printers apply to color printers as well, particularly if you have disabled color printing (via the Page Settings).

Symptom	Remedy
Faint printing	Check that your color ink cartridge is not low or empty.
Wrong color (1)	See above.
Wrong color (2)	Getting the screen color and printed color to match perfectly is rather difficult. It's extremely common for certain colors to look different on the printed page than they do on the screen. This is determined by your monitor and its driver, and your printer and its driver. Refer to the documentation of your printer and your monitor for information about color matching.