Black text is not black

[efc]

I recently noticed that none of the "black" text in my document was actually printing on my laser printer as black. I created the attached simple Affinity Publisher document to demonstrate the problem. This document accepts all the default settings for a new "Press Ready" letter sized document, which includes the CMYK/8 color format and U.S. Web Coated (SWOP) v2 color profile. I changed nothing, added a single line of text, and printed the document. The text on the printed document is noticeably dithered.

I tried exporting a PDF (also attached) and find that when I try to print it, the text is exactly the same, dithered  a bit.

I have confirmed that the document has (by default) chosen the proper C0 M0 Y0 K100 color of black for the body text.

Note that I can use the same laser printer to print a similar simple test from Apple's Pages software and the text appears crisp and fully black.

What am I doing wrong with Affinity Publisher? How can I be sure that when I export my PDF for the printer, it will export with proper black text when I cannot confirm this myself before sending it off? I'd like to be able to print decent proofs in my office, it is extremely frustrating that everything I print comes out looking pixellated (see the photograph, Affinity Publisher sample on top, Pages sample below). 

test-black.afpub test-black.pdf pages-black.pdf

[Pšenda]

Due to the holes in the letters, it looks like some toner saving eco/draft mode.

[efc]

3 hours ago, Pšenda said:

it looks like some toner saving

Thanks for the suggestion, Pšenda, but I do not think this is eco mode. Note that the text printed by Pages on the same printer is properly black in the photo. You could help me test that theory by downloading the two PDF's and comparing printouts of each on your own printer.

If this is eco mode on the printer, then why is Affinity Publisher invoking it and where would I find a setting to tell Affinity Publisher not to do that?

[Pšenda]

To me, it looks like this way to save toner.

https://admin.kuleuven.be/icts/english-site/info/paperfriendlyprinting

If it were just a misinterpretation of black (the problem with black in CMYK is discussed very often here), I would expect a finer print raster.

Edited December 18, 2021 by Pšenda

[Dazmondo77]

I've been furiously ranting over this issue for years. 

Just posted this on another post regarding similar issues:

40 minutes ago, Dazmondo77 said:

Affinitys print dialog is prob my biggest gripe with the suite, as just printing a text document set up CMYK with all text set to solid black, direct from Publisher is a total joke - just ran a page off this morning, as I find it convenient to use a DTP app to print from!?!?!? - looking through a linen tester, it looks like even a page of solid black text that's set from the print dialog to force solid black, first gets rasterised and converted to RGB before it hits the printers RIP, which then, instead of receiving solid black vector information to rasterise at the printers max resolution, the RIP receives an RGB picture which is then converted back to CMYK and then throws away the CMY information resulting in a really poor quality page of text that is made up of an halftone dot instead of nice crisp solid black - totally unacceptable - I've never come across another app that prints this bad - even text edit on the mac can send a page of nice sharp black text to a postscript printer. 

I know the official 'can't be arsed' response is 'make a pdf and print from acrobat'.

[efc]

8 hours ago, Dazmondo77 said:

I know the official 'can't be arsed' response is 'make a pdf and print from acrobat'.

Actually, I tried making a PDF, but the PDF prints the same way.

12 hours ago, Pšenda said:

To me, it looks like this way to save toner.

Pšenda, you have said the same thing twice now and this is NOT AN ECO PRINT PROBLEM. The printer is not set to any eco mode and all other apps print text just fine. This is something that PUBLISHER is doing to both the page printed and the page exported.

11 hours ago, BofG said:

can you show your PDF export settings?

I am not sure which PDF export settings you mean. This document is a DEFAULT document, as I described. Do you mean the settings in the Export window when I choose to export a PDF? There I am using the "PDF (press ready)" preset which is 300 DPI (and says nothing will be rasterized), includes the bleed, previews the export when complete, and exports the whole document. If you mean another set of PDF export settings, please let me know where to find them.

[walt.farrell]

22 hours ago, efc said:

Note that I can use the same laser printer to print a similar simple test from Apple's Pages software and the text appears crisp and fully black.

I don't know if it has any relevance to your problem, but Adobe Acrobat Reader DC shows this for the Font in the PDF from Publisher:

And this for the PDF from Pages:

[efc]

I just want to lay to rest any doubts about the "eco mode" point that Pšenda has raised twice. I have attached a picture of the printer settings page that show that no eco mode is turned on.

I have also attached a second sample test printed directly from Affinity Publisher. Before printing this sample I changed the document settings to use the RGB/8 color space and sRGB IEC61966-2.1 color profile. Then I selected the text "this is a test" and selected its fill color from the "Character" studio tab. Even though the color had been set to C0 Mo Y0 K100, the RGB color now showed as R35 G31 B32. I dragged the sliders to R0 G0 B0 and added the text "RGB" at the end of the line.

Interestingly, if you look closely at this sample, the word "Hello" (which still uses the CMYK black) looks noticeably more degraded than the rest of the text (which uses RGB black). However, the RGB black is still noticeably worse than the sample Courier text in the other image which came straight out of the same printer and also worse than the Pages sample in a previous message. I think it is clear that Publisher is doing something that degrades text printed from at least my Brother HL-L2340D laser printer, which makes it of dubious value for desktop publishing in my office.

Walt, thanks for noticing that Publisher embedded a TrueType "CID" font while Pages embedded a plain TrueType font. This is interesting, and I know nothing about CID fonts, but it appears that this has to do with the number of characters that can be encoded in a font and not really to do with its rendering.

Does anyone from Affinity ever check in on these forums? I'd love to know, definitively, if this is what they expect as output from Publisher. I've spent days preparing a book and have already paid for this app from the App Store, before I spend much more time it would be nice to know if this is a "bug" that will be fixed or something Affinity is proud of and expects to work this way.

 

 

[walt.farrell]

Also, if I open the PDF from Publisher in Photo, I get a CMYK document. But if I open the PDF from Pages in Photo, I get an RGB document. Not sure what that means; may just be that there's no color profile in the Pages PDF file, but there is in the Publisher one, and Photo assumed RGB without a known profile.

Sampling the black colors, with the PDFs displayed in Acrobat Reader DC:

• Publisher PDF: RGB 35/31/32, CMYK 68/67/65/74  (Note: in the .afpub, the RGB value matches this, but the CMYK showed as 0/0/0/100)
• Pages PDF:      RGB  0/0/0,       CMYK 72/68/67/88

Again, not sure what this means.

 

[efc]

6 minutes ago, BofG said:

In the export window, click more and show what is set in there.

Ah! I had not noticed that little "more" button. Image of the settings attached. One thing I notice here is that the "color space" is still set to CMYK, even though at this point the document settings show RGB. I'll try tweaking that. (I did try, no difference.)

Edited December 18, 2021 by efc
updated result of tweak to settings

[walt.farrell]

13 minutes ago, efc said:

Does anyone from Affinity ever check in on these forums?

Frequently.

But:

1. They are very busy, and it can take a few days.
2. You first posted after their normal business hours for the week, and there are fewer Serif staff around on the evenings and weekends.
3. They are heading into their Christmas shutdown, but there are still a few days left (20th - 23rd) before most of them disappear until Jan. 4.

[efc]

BofG, thanks for your recommendation. I tried to do exactly what you recommended. A new CMYK document with CMYK text set to 0/0/0/100. Since there is no "pdf x1" export preset I chose "PDF/X-1a:2003" which seemed closest to what you suggested. However, this preset would not let me uncheck "Embed profiles" (it was greyed out, checked). I went ahead anyway.

I even downloaded Adobe Acrobat Reader to print from (even though I usually avoid that program in favor of Apple's built in Preview). No dice, I had exactly the same result as in my first sample above.

I then tried exporting with the "PDF (for print)" preset, which did allow me to uncheck the "Embed profiles". Same exact result.

I tried printing both documents from Preview and they look exactly like they look coming out of Acrobat Reader.

[efc]

7 hours ago, BofG said:

Attached is a PDF made using the process I described, it has pure black (100%k only) text

Thank you for that, BofG! Unfortunately, even though I am printing your PDF with Acrobat Reader using the advanced settings you suggest, the pure black text still comes out the same as the other samples.

I imagine you are correct and there is some poor interaction between my laser printer and Affinity Publisher's PDFs. My printer has no settings (really, none, at least on the Mac) to change, it is a cheap under $100 Brother HL-L2340D. I am still puzzled as to why every other app on my Mac prints just fine. I wonder what Publisher is doing differently. It makes me wish Publisher had a "no color management" mode or something to print simple black and white on home printers.

[v_kyr]

Did you select "Thick Paper" from the printers "Paper Type Properties" list, or did you tried if it makes any difference here for your Brother printer then?

[efc]

12 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

select "Thick Paper"

Thank you v_kyr. That "Thick Paper" setting does, indeed, reduce the problem. The type is still not as crisp and clean as it usually is in other apps, it looks a bit fuzzy around the edges, but it has better coverage.

The odd thing was that I had no idea this "Thick Paper" setting existed for my printer because almost all Mac apps do not show the settings panel that includes it! Luckily I found that in Acrobat Reader I could go to Print > Printer > Print Settings > Media Type and find that option. Better yet, there was also an "Advanced" disclosure on that pane that made a whole boatload of other printer options available. I found that "Plain Paper" with "Graphics Quality" set to "Text" (instead of "Graphics") and "Improve Toner Fixing" turned on helped. Not quite as fuzzy as "Think Paper", much better than the samples I had before, but still not as crisp as other apps printing on the same printer.

Your suggestion opened up a world of possibilities, thank you!

I still do hope Affinity Publisher can be improved to print at least as well on home printers as most other Mac apps. People should not have to go through this much fussing to get decent text from a desktop publishing application.

[v_kyr]

2 hours ago, efc said:

Thank you v_kyr. That "Thick Paper" setting does, indeed, reduce the problem. The type is still not as crisp and clean as it usually is in other apps, it looks a bit fuzzy around the edges, but it has better coverage.

Note that you sometimes have to do the opposite, aka if this option is enabled in the printer driver and you don't get good results, you have to use/put thinner paper into the printer. -- I once upon a time also had a Brother laser printer and remembered one or two things from those times!

[R C-R]

8 hours ago, efc said:

The odd thing was that I had no idea this "Thick Paper" setting existed for my printer because almost all Mac apps do not show the settings panel that includes it!

In the printer dialog in Affinity (& almost all other Mac apps) there should be a "Show Details" button. If you click it, you should see more print options, but what exactly they are will depend on the printer model & the driver installed for it. For more about this, see https://support.apple.com/en-is/guide/mac-help/mh35838/12.0/mac/12.0 (or for whatever macOS version you are using).

[lacerto]

On 12/19/2021 at 5:46 PM, efc said:

"Improve Toner Fixing" turned on helped.

There is another option, "Adjust the Print Density" ("Density Adjustment" in macOS), which might further improve density of black.

As a general note, as it seems that your printer uses PCL and does not have PostScript support, it is basically best to just send it pure RGB data, so e.g. to get dark black, set text to RGB 0, 0, 0. You cannot send this kind of a printer CMYK data (even it the app itself supported it, as when printing from Adobe Acrobat, which probably explains why your K100 PDFs print just the same as when printing from an Affinity app). Some printer drivers might support forcing conversion of RGB black to K-only (to avoid possible fuzziness caused by printing small text in four colors, or simply to save color toners), but it does not make sense to try to control ink usage from within the app when printing to this kind of a device.

If your final print target is CMYK and text needs to be in CMYK (specifically K100) for that reason, your local prints to this kind of a printer would then be converted to something like R40 G40 B40 [or less, depending on the working color profiles] and be finally converted by the print driver to some kind of a dark gray, taking into account all driver settings (like toner saving, print density, graphic quality, etc.). Your other apps (normally supporting only RGB) would send R0, G0, B0, which would produce darker and crisper black (possibly using just black toner in small text sizes, depending on how this specific driver operates). 

Other apps might be able to convert K100 to R0, G0, B0 when sending to RGB devices (e.g. Adobe apps do that when exporting K100 from a CMYK document to RGB PDF), but unfortunately that does not happen when using Affinity apps, so any CMYK black conversion is likely to produce less intense black than sending directly R0, G0, B0.

EDIT: The Pages PDF that you had attached in your initial post had, as expected, the black in R0, G0, B0 (while the PDF created from Publisher had it in K100).

[v_kyr]

Well, if every other MacOS app just prints fine blacks here with the default unaltered printer settings, then it's overall more a general Affinity problem in the way they reuse and access the printer driver here at all.

[Bisonium]

Hi, this happens to me too (using Windows Desktop app). Therefore, I made this little test:

1. Created new document (Publisher)
2. created a box filled with pure black
3. Created some text (pure black)
4. Double-clicked the "colour-fill-circle" in Publisher

The text appears to be totally black in the colour-square (dot located in the farest left-down corner). Bud the RGB-values are actually (31,35,32) and also in colour triangle one can see that the colour is not pure black.

Also, compared to the black box, the text is not black.

If I export as PDF now, the text will not be totally black (I can check that with the colour pick-tool after import).

If I manually re-drag the dot in the colour square to farest left-down), the colour changes on the text (and in the RGB values, as also in the colour-triangle). 

If I export as PDF now, everything seems normal, text is totally black (I can check that with the colour pick-tool after import).

 

Could this be some kind of bug? I think it might have something to do with your problem anyways.

 

Best

Mattias

 

[efc]

17 hours ago, R C-R said:

there should be a "Show Details" button

Yes, I always "Show Details" in print dialog boxes. The odd thing is that the details are very different in Adobe Reader than in Affinity Publisher and most other Mac apps. Among other things, the Adobe details include an "Advanced" button that reveals a whole set of printer options that are not available from print dialogs in Affinity Publisher or elsewhere. You can see the comparison attached (Adobe on the left, Affinity on the right, and no, there is not "Print Settings" option in Affinity).

9 hours ago, v_kyr said:

if every other MacOS app just prints fine

My guess is other Mac apps are printing either without color space control or as RGB. Still, even RGB Publisher docs are printing in this odd degraded way, so, yes, I think there is an Affinity problem here.

8 hours ago, Bisonium said:

Could this be some kind of bug?

I love your test, Bisonium! Nice summary of the issues. The only thing I would add is that even the "totally black" PDF exported in your test would probably print, on my printer, as some very dark shade of gray. I can play printer tricks to try to achieve a deeper black, but I don't have to play those tricks from other Mac apps. 

[R C-R]

9 minutes ago, efc said:

Yes, I always "Show Details" in print dialog boxes. The odd thing is that the details are very different in Adobe Reader than in Affinity Publisher and most other Mac apps.

Adobe uses its own print routines, which is not the same as the ones built into the Mac OS.

That said, if in the Affinity (or in many other Mac apps) print window you click on the popup menu named "Range & Scale" you should get other options. I can't tell you what they are (because they differ for each printer) but you may find the equivalent of (some of?) the same options as the Advanced ones in Adobe.

[efc]

2 hours ago, R C-R said:

Range & Scale

I am a Mac user since 1984 (!) and am very familiar with how Mac software presents printer drivers. I looked at all the options available in Affinity Publisher, including "Range & Scale" and nothing like the "Printer Settings" available in Adobe Reader is present. My memory is far from perfect, but I believe what Adobe is presenting is, in fact, an old version of the Mac print dialog box that most modern software long since moved away from. Clearly, though, this old print dialog still has some neat tricks up its sleeve!

[R C-R]

1 hour ago, efc said:

I looked at all the options available in Affinity Publisher, including "Range & Scale" and nothing like the "Printer Settings" available in Adobe Reader is present.

Can you post a screenshot of the window with the Range & Scale popup menu open? I don't have anything like your Brother printer but for a very low end Samsung monochrome printer mine looks like this:

Selecting Media & Quality gives me access to a Media Type menu with several paper weights & types, including plain paper, like in your PS screenshot.

Yours will be different but it might provide a clue for someone with the same or a similar printer to yours about where to look for what might be available.

[efc]

40 minutes ago, R C-R said:

Can you post a screenshot of the window with the Range & Scale popup menu open?

Here you go. Note that my "Media & Quality" is very limited in Affinity Publisher. The thing to look at in the Adobe image above is what shows up below the "Advanced" disclosure button. That is the stuff that cannot be found in Affinity Publisher.

And really, this is all beside the point. Nobody should have to hunt through all these settings to get a good basic black print out of a desktop publishing app. The very fact that it is this difficult is something I hope Serif takes seriously and repairs. I would ask for a preference when exporting or printing for "Simplified Blacks" that makes anything that is either RGB 0/0/0 or CYMK 0/0/0/100 a true black for whatever output device the user has chosen. The app should do the work, not the user.