Pixelated text by printing

[Vehmann]

Hello everybody,

I have an issue with printing directly from affinity designer / publisher (windows). All embedded fonts turn into pixel. So it's a bit blurry. I never had problems by printing it directly from 'the other big well known app', but affinity is doing something different ...

I would say, that it happens already by loading the files into affinity.

I researched, but couldn't find any solution. Can you help me?

NM

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, Vehmann said:

I would say, that it happens already by loading the files into affinity.

What kind of files are they, and how are you loading them into the Affinity applications?

[Vehmann]

It happens with ALL PDF-files.

Most of the time I use drag & drop, but I also use ctrl+shift+M sometimes. It makes no difference.

[walt.farrell]

Thanks.

So, basically, you're Placing the files into an Affinity document. If you select one of them using the Move Tool, and look in the Context Toolbar, are you using Passthrough mode or Interpreted mode?

Can you provide a sample .afpub or .afdesign document (and the PDF if it's not Embedded) that show the problem?

Do you have the fonts installed?

Also, is there some purpose to putting them into Affinity and then printing, rather than simply printing from a PDF viewer? 

[Vehmann]

Thanks for the answer.

I think I use the passthrough mode (german interface = 'Transfer').

I doesn't matter which font it is. But yeah, i have a lot of customers for printing. So i don't have them installed sometimes.

Look in the file and zoom in. It's not much. But if I print posters or even small A4-documents, I can see a difference between 'the well-known big brother app' and Affinity. It's not sharp. That's a pity.

In the workflow it's pretty much better to print from Affinity, because I often print several files on one printing sheet (printer roll) for the plotter. I used to work very well in the past (with Ind***gn).

text.afpub

[joe_l]

That's interesting, never noticed it before. I made a comparison. Extracted your PDF and placed in ID 2024 and printed it directly. The ID version is indeed a bit sharper. Under the magnifier you see, that in Affinity the text is a bit bleeding, as if the colours were not exactly printed on top of each other. Seems to be the printing engine of Affinity, because exporting from Affinity and printing from Acrobat gives the same sharp result, as printing directly from ID.

Only workaround, export as PDF and print from Acrobat or an other PDF viewer.

[R C-R]

10 hours ago, joe_l said:

Seems to be the printing engine of Affinity...

Affinity has no printing engine of its own. All printing relies on the print services built into the OS & the print drivers & their support files that have been installed on the computer. A consequence of this is different printers will offer different options in the Affinity print dialog & may produce different results from printing to a different printer, even with similar options enabled.

[joe_l]

10 hours ago, R C-R said:

Affinity has no printing engine of its own.

Indesign, Acrobat or FoxIt Reader have one? In my test case I was printing from various apps to the same printer getting different results.

Serif / Canva have to ask themselves at what target audience they are aiming? "Professionals" or "amateurs" (purposely written in quotation marks to avoid discussions)? They want to tackle Adobe? But "fail" in proper printing from within layout programmes? Not a complaint, just a thought. I am used to print from Acrobat if I want "perfect" prints. Not ideal, but a compromise I accepted.

[Vehmann]

Honestly I don't really want to make compromisses to have less efficiency. Also wanted to get away from Adobe.

Hopefully one day the developers department will improve the printing engine ...

Any comments from the staff here?

[R C-R]

11 hours ago, joe_l said:

Indesign, Acrobat or FoxIt Reader have one?

All I can tell you is the staff have mentioned in more than one discussion over the years that Affinity just provides an interface to the print services built into the OS, which in turn rely on the print drivers & their support files that are installed on the computer. IOW, it is not an 'engine' in the usual sense.

From reading between the lines in some of their comments I think this may not expose all the options or settings that are available in other apps, which may amount to a bug, but that is only a guess.

[walt.farrell]

On 9/5/2024 at 4:03 AM, Vehmann said:

Look in the file and zoom in. It's not much. But if I print posters or even small A4-documents, I can see a difference between 'the well-known big brother app' and Affinity. It's not sharp. That's a pity.

I printed your sample .afpub file from Publisher, and then I Exported it as a PDF and printed the PDF from Preview. Both on my Epson ET-2550 inkjet printer.

Then I put the printouts together and photographed it (below, zoomed-in), with Publisher's printout on top and Preview's underneath.

While there are clear differences, I don't think one is more pixelated than the other. What I see is that:

• The printout from Preview is more dense; and
• The overall width of the printed text from Preview is narrower (which might help account for the density being different).

[Vehmann]

17 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

I printed your sample .afpub file from Publisher, and then I Exported it as a PDF and printed the PDF from Preview. Both on my Epson ET-2550 inkjet printer.

Then I put the printouts together and photographed it (below, zoomed-in), with Publisher's printout on top and Preview's underneath.

While there are clear differences, I don't think one is more pixelated than the other. What I see is that:

• The printout from Preview is more dense; and
• The overall width of the printed text from Preview is narrower (which might help account for the density being different).

Well, there's nearly no difference between them.
But I think I have the same problem like 'joe_l' ...
Thanks for your effort.

[Alfred]

17 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

While there are clear differences, I don't think one is more pixelated than the other. What I see is that:

• The printout from Preview is more dense; and
• The overall width of the printed text from Preview is narrower (which might help account for the density being different).

 

7 minutes ago, Vehmann said:

Well, there's nearly no difference between them.

The difference in density looks quite small here, but the difference in the overall width of the printed text is very obvious.

[joe_l]

I would call the difference quite obvious. Above APu, below from Acrobat.

[Vehmann]

Guess which file is printed from Affinity. Same properties, same printer.

[Callum]

Hi Vehmann,

Apologies for the delayed response,

You may find better results using interpret over passthrough as Passthrough mode keeps the original PDF unchanged when exporting to PDF, ensuring perfect quality. However, on-screen or when not exporting, it shows a high-quality preview instead which is likely what is being printed.

If you continue to have issues please could you tell me which settings ( if any ) you have under File > Print > Rasterisation.

Thanks
C

[Vehmann]

Hey Callum,

thanks for the response.

There is no better result by using the passthough mode:

Quote

I think I use the passthrough mode (german interface = 'Transfer').

Other users also reproduced this problem here.

Rasterisation is set with 300 dpi. No checkboxes are selected.

For me, it really is an important matter. Just the other day I was thinking about the fact that I can't just print my files in a roundabout way. I wanted to use Affinity as an alternative to Adobe. Printing directly from the programs is part of my workflow. For example, I arrange the images on a print sheet and then print from the roll, etc. Exporting the files first and then printing them via Acrobat is cumbersome and takes time. I hope you can improve it one day.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Best regards

V

[lacerto]

The reasons for deteriorated quality are most probably related to the fact that Affinity apps cannot pass embedded fonts to the printer driver, but instead rasterize the content. There is no quality difference whether using Interpret or Passthrough mode (the former of course tested while having the used fonts installed on the system).

Whether this is called a "print engine", or an unwelcome app-intervention when passing a file to system for printing, the behavior is different compared to e.g. Adobe apps and QuarkXPress, which pass the document with fonts and native color (K100 in this case).

This happens both on macOS and Windows. I used Adobe PDF as the virtual printer to verify this. On macOS it seems that colors get additionally reinterpreted (resulting in rich black raster image, while on Windows the rasterized image stayed close to K100), but I am not sure if this is because of a CMYK profile conflict (on macOS it seems that full Adobe PDF options are not available at print time so I used the "Press Quality" preset).