Printing Sharper in inDesign C2 v3.01+

[Marcus_Yee@adobeforums.com]

I am having problems printing sharper/smoother text. I've printed the same font/size on other apps (MS Word, Illustrator, Freehand) and it's a lot sharper than inDesign. I've printed doc on the new iMacs and 17" PowerBook and it's still ragged/jagged text. But if I were to print on a PC, it's sharp. Is there some sort of print settings I have to change in order to print smoother? I've messed with all the print settings and still no change. If I save my doc as a PDF, then it prints sharp. I would like to skip the pdf part.

TIA

Marcus

[Fred_Goldman@adobeforums.com]

It most likely has something to do with the printer. What printer do you have?

[Marcus_Yee@adobeforums.com]

I've printed on a Brother HL 2000 series (non-post script) and on a HP 4MV (post- script)

[Fred_Goldman@adobeforums.com]

I had the same problem on a HP LJ1100 and what fixed it was choosing Send As Raster in the printer driver. Maybe you can find something similar in your printer driver settings.

[Richard_Sohanchyk@adobeforums.com]

Does exporting to PDF smooth out the printing?

[Fred_Goldman@adobeforums.com]

Richard,

Take a look at hte last two lines of the OP's message.

[Bjorn_Ost@adobeforums.com]

I have seen this reported a lot with Brother printers in this forum. Not sure if all of those people have faulty settings somewhere or if it actually are the Brother having a problem with Indesign.

My guess is that the "unsharpness" comes from some color manegement settings that causes your printer to output black text rasterized (consisting of dots to make a greyscale instead of the intended 100k).

CS2 has, I think, some setting for how black should be output. To mimick final print or accurately or something like that. I'm stuck in CS1 so can't tell you more than that. And always make sure your document cmyk is same as your target profile when printing or a conversion will occur.

[DavidT]

Bjorn: it's unclear from the topic header what version the op is using.

Yes, CS2 does have a preference for displaying or printing blacks accurately or inaccurately.

[Dernhelm@adobeforums.com]

Yes, I found that happening with my non-postscript printer and found that I had to make a pdf and then print. It gave me the sharpness that I received from my other programs. that worked for me altho its a hassle to do over the long run. I might just invest in a low-cost post-script prnter.