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Weird Text Print Quality Issue


gaufde

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I just found some very weird behavior while trying to print out a document from Publisher. I was printing my document and noticed that on the cover some of the text was printing with a worse quality than others:

IMG_6736.thumb.jpeg.901d24354efe7e73f4c926836abd2631.jpeg

See how the first two lines of text appear bold? That is the issue, they are all supposed to be the same. So, I went hunting to try and find the problem. I tried exporting a pdf and printing from preview on my Mac. Doing that made all the text uniform, but the quality was bad for all three lines instead of just the two. After a bunch of trouble shooting, I noticed that on my document the image overlapped the first two lines of text that were having problems:2061350881_ScreenShot2019-11-25at12_02_22AM.thumb.png.983ba49ee81c53425941a5fb0c67be0a.png 

So, I tried cropping the image so that there was no overlap and then printed it again. And...it worked!IMG_6737.thumb.jpeg.9abbbc30dfefae54d9b81b8232af8c3e.jpeg

Now, I have no idea why the image overlapping the text would make any difference. So, I thought that I would share this here to see if this is a bug that can be reproduced on other equipment than what I am using. I have files that I can share if needed, however they are larger than the 512MB upload limit.

Publisher 1.7.3 (trial version so I haven't tested the beta yet)

Mac OS 10.14.6

HP M750 LaserJet Enterprise 

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54 minutes ago, mac_heibu said:

The image contsins transparency, so under certain output conditions (PDF-X/1 for example) the underlying text is (necessarily rasterized.

To avoid this: Place the text above the image..

This is sort of what I was thinking. However, the text is above the image and so I don't see why it would need to be rasterized. I have text above an image on another page of this document and everything works fine there. 

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The group up top is just two text layers that aren't interacting with the image at all. I tried playing around with that as well, but ungrouping the text had no effect on the images.

 

The files are too large to upload here and I don't want to modify them too much, so I have created a dropbox link where you can download them. I have included the one with the problem, one that I have modified so that the image doesn't overlap, and the image that is linked from affinity photo. https://www.dropbox.com/sh/s0mo6ykbdpqrrx5/AABPxzn1QLKGeQLmpsThE3pDa?dl=0

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Thanks for testing this! I just tried your exported pdf and the also used the pdf/x-1a preset to try exporting it myself. I printed each from Preview and both worked fine. However, when I was testing earlier, exporting using the pdf(for print) preset did not work well. I'm not sure why these would give different results, but I guess that is good to know.

I will keep your suggestion in mind to print from other applications. However, I am still interested to see if my weird results can be reproduced by anyone. We have figured out a work around, now it might be nice to see if there is a printing issue in Publisher than can be fixed in a future update. 

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It prints fine to both my PostScript laser printers.

Likely the issue is your print driver's ability to flatten transparency. PDF/X1-a is a flattened transparency pdf model and Affinity applications handle the flattening during export to that pdf type. Choosing to print and sending the page as a bitmap may also work, I dunno.

fwiw, I rarely print direct from any software, instead prefer to go to pdf and print from Acrobat or Adobe Reader after (usually) a brief review of the pdf.

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