Printing lessons

I needed to get a Word document with several logos printed today, but the simple thing proved to be pretty difficult since I wanted to keep the text sharp and the colors in the logos correct.

First lesson: Word won't support certain EPS format images, so I printed a PDF document from Word, and then sent that PDF to the printer. The text appeared a bit blurry compared to the Word original. The solution: make sure no scaling options are set. PDF printers often scale the page to something like 98% of the original, which combined with anti-aliasing can make the text blurry.

Second lesson: Black is not always just black. If you have material (like images) that are in RGB format, the printer drivers can make less than perfect choices when priting out the page. This can happen because of a poor RGB -> CMYK conversion. So, if your text looks like it has a small shadow in it, the changes are your text is being printed with the subcolors combined. This wastes the printing colors, and doesn't produce full black.

To summarize: Watch out what you print!