UKC

I've several word documents which consist of a colour photo, including back and white colours and then a whole lot of black text.  When I print it, the colour photo plots ok, but the text part doesn't. If I save the document as a pdf, then everything prints ok.

Any solutions? I can't convert everything I want to print to a pdf!

Thanks

Is the text normal word text or a graphic of text? Also what kind of device and printer?

Print drivers!

I'll have you know that I've been a Windows advocate for almost as long as I've been a Linux advocate (NO! I do not recommend that old grannies install Linux on their home PCs and spend their dying days in menuconfig and using vim to hack Xorg.conf! Windows has its place!) and, as such, it just pains me to say that I had the experience of printing a spreadsheet from an iPad, the other day.

Firstly, spreadsheets are inherently hard to print because they aren't , by design, fit to paper size. Secondly, I'd never printed from an Apple device before, full stop, let alone this particular iPad on my personal home printer on my home network.

I was absolutely blown away. Press the print button -- preview shows, with slider to adjust the scale of the spreadsheet until it matches the number of pages I'm willing to spend on the hard copy -- press print -- list of printers on the wifi appears, no drivers needed -- pick one -- choose black and white, double-sided -- paper with print-out is emitted from the printer.

It just worked. Honestly, I think I'm getting old because I can't be arsed to ever install a "printer driver" again in my life. Why are we still f*cking about with those, in 2021?

I use Open Office for documents and even this seems to be temperamental when printing them off, margins missing being the biggest issue. I print them after converting them to PDF and they come out perfect. Odd isn't it.

In a simple sense the Mac OS's always convert the printing to a PDF and this gives the simplicity you observe. However for a few days last year the security certificate on a whole pile of HP Printers expired on the Mac and there was no printing here for almost a week! Quite a terrible error in this day and age!

It is not always OK though to convert to PDF for Windows printing. A few days ago I created a student information sheet - three illustrator diagrams and 3 clinical picture and various text in a table and my colleague could not print it whatever I sent her!

Are you out of black ink, and the printing of the PDF is using the colour cartridge to make black, but printing from word is trying to use the black cartridge?

Thanks Andy. Most embarrassing as although I’d checked the black ink, it seems that the level had dropped too low for a Word document but a pdf was ok- don’t know about mixing colours when printing a pdf. Once I’d topped the tank up and run a deep clean on the black everything printed ok.