Troublesome Shadow Printing

[Klaus Nordby]

There are still some problems with printing Shadows! On printing a piece on my excellent Epson Photo EX printer, I got this highly undesired bounding box "effect" (attached, simulated).

Until they fix this, users will have to resort to exporting high-res TIFFs and printing that.


K

[gwpriester]

Looking at my output just now, while I did not get the bounding box Klaus did, my example had two horizontal rectangles behind the squares, a white and gray rectangle with black outlines.

Where the shadow covers the outline (in both my examples--converted to editable shapes and ungrouped and not) there is a slight shift of the outline upwards.

Hmmmm. Not good.

Gary

Gary Priester

Moderator Person

Be It Every So Humble...

[Clements]

Yesterday, when I printed a diagram (I imported a couple digital photos and gave them drop-shadows) to an HP5000 (a b&w postscript printer) none of the drop-shadows printed. The same file printed fine to my HP3000 inkjet.

When I changed the output options in Xara X to print as bitmap, then the drop-shadows printed on the HP5000.

[Klaus Nordby]

There are still some problems with printing Shadows! On printing a piece on my excellent Epson Photo EX printer, I got this highly undesired bounding box "effect" (attached, simulated).

Until they fix this, users will have to resort to exporting high-res TIFFs and printing that.


K

[Klaus Nordby]

My Epson Photo EX printer has NO special photo cartridge, just its normal two cartridges (one containing its 5 colors, one with black only), so this can't be the cause. But I shall certainly try the "print as bitmap" option.

Thanks!


K

[gwpriester]

Klaus

I tried to replicate your problem on my equally excellent HP Deskjet 970Cxi and was unable to replicate it.

You might try converting the shadowed object to editable shapes and then ungrouping the object from the shadow and see if that helps.

Gary

Gary Priester

Moderator Person

Be It Every So Humble...

[ivan louette]

No solution for the above printing problem (actually my printers are out and thus I cannot test).

BUT Gary, when you convert to editable shapes, check allways SINGLE TILE for filling and for transparency. Most problems of ghost edges disappears while chosing these settings!

I think Xara might chose single tile as a default setting for filling and transparency when converting to shapes. That may avoid this kind of surprise!

Regards,

ivan

[jclements]

I'm right in the middle of printing 11 x 17 output to my Epson 3000.

I've got 3 photos (each about 4" x 2.5") and each has a drop shawdow, the rest of the design consists of a few lines of text and vector logo.

In Xara Print Options, the OutPut Options were: Print as NORMAL. The results are that all the objects print BUT the ink saturation is very dark.

When OutPut options are set to AS ANTIALIASED BITAMAP, the ink saturation matches pretty close to what I see on the monitor. ALSO, a few times, a portion of one or two of the drop shades had alternating wide-horizontal stripes of dark and light grey (each stripe about 3/4" high). When I REBOOTED and tried printing again the drop shadows seemed to print okay and the saturation was still "normal.

I'm thinking its a memory issue. I running NT40, sp5. 200 meg ram. My Espon settings were: Photo Quality Paper Ink Jet paper, 720 dpi, Super Microweave, and Finest Detail was NOT selected.

[This message was edited by John Clements on March 12, 2001 at 04:06 PM.]

[Mark Goodall]

Klaus

The printer driver in your case may treat a bitmap, which it may believe to be a photograph, differently from other objects and colour correct appropriately.
Xara X may print any vector object ( or part of ) as a bitmap, rather than as a vector graphic, where a conversion of the vector object to bitmap is necessary to implement such effects as transparency, bevels, shadows etc, and in boundary areas where the same colour is rendered as part of a vector object and as part of a bitmap and the printer driver treats these colours differently you will obviously get strange boundary effects.

The use of this colour correction is usually a user option in the printer settings. Some printers achieve this correction by using different ink cartridges, others may just correct the colour values.

So there are at least two ways to fix the problem, print as bitmap or switch off photo mode in the printer.

Luciano's problems with eps files are likely due to some vector objects being defined as CMYK and then rendered as an RGB bitmap (Xara renders all bitmaps to the printer as RGB bitmaps). In many printers the colour conversion will mean the RGB and CMYK areas look different, in addition as per the inkjet printers some colour postscript printers have photo colour correction control ( which affects all bitmaps) and again this can cause identical colours to appear differently in different contexts.

Mark

[Luciano]

I have experience of this problem when printing .eps files.

I suggest you to give a flat transparency of 0% to the objects under the shadows and surronding areas.

The parts that look clearer in the example posted are surely automatically converted to rgb components before printing by xarax, while the other part of the underlying rectangle might be in cmyk.

Giving a flat transparency of 0% to objects (even if nothing changes on screen) tells xarax to print it as rgb.

Let me know if it works.

ciao
Luciano