Comments on: Printing horrors

By: Will

Will — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 01:35:12 +0000

Developing for AIR on Mac OS X. The FlexPrintJob.printAsBitmap = false does not seem to do anything for me. Printed text is fuzzy.

By: Marc

Marc — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 11:42:21 +0000

Theo, like I mentioned the OSX printouts were a bit blurrier than windows. But we’re making multi-page timelines that get printed out and hanged on a wall. So the intended target audience is standing back a few feet. Maybe our requirements are just a bit less stringent than yours.

Das,
printAsBitmap true/false doesn’t seem to do a lot for us.

By: DasFX

DasFX — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 21:37:13 +0000

Anyone notice any difference when setting FlexPrintJob.printAsBitmap to false?

By: Theo

Theo — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 17:03:25 +0000

I’ve tried printing components containing text rendered with both device fonts (the default, Verdana) and embedded fonts on OS X the printed text is really, really blurry. Printing a 72 dpi bitmap with text doesn’t look as blurry as this does, it must be something wrong with the way Flash/Flex prepares the print job, at least on the Mac. You would expect something that’s basically vectors all the way to do crisp printing, instead it looks like a bitmap rendering at 50 dpi blown up to 300.

By: Ben Throop

Ben Throop — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 21:33:51 +0000

I print directly from the Display List too and it does keep things as vector. In fact, the Canvas I’m printing from is only around 425 x 550 (Half of 8.5 x 11 times 100px), and it’s not blurry at all. The only error I’m seeing is that I get an extremely thin blue line on the left and bottom of the image in the print. Strangely, it only happens when I do a physical print – when I print to PDF it doesn’t show up. Anyone ever see that?

By: Marc

Marc — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 17:38:44 +0000

We had some problems when capturing a bitmap and then printing that with bluriness. The problem is the printer has a much higher DPI than the screen so the anti-aliasing is all wrong and gives a blurry look.

But we moved to a scheme where we print directly from a display object to the PrintJob and it’s working pretty well. I assume it’s keeping the vector graphics until a later stage in the process. On OSX it’s slightly blurry and on Windows it’s perfect.

We are using system rendered and not embedded fonts.

By: Theo

Theo — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 17:26:45 +0000

Do you have any tips on making the quality acceptable? I’ve tried printing directly from Flex with PrintJob but the quality is awful, it’s all blurry. Have I missed something?