Text Quality on Printed PDFs

[Emma1234567]

Hello - I am trying to print a pdf and the pdf is high quality but the text that is printed comes out quite pixelated. I was also having the same issue on a Brother printer and found that from the print dialog box if I change the setting for Printer Features > Print Setting from Graphics to Text it solved the issue. I cannot find what the equivalent setting would be on our HP printer. Below is an image of what it looked like set to Graphics and what it looked like once I changed it to Text on the Brother printer. Any ideas would be great appreciated. Thanks!

[John_Getzke]

> Any ideas would be great appreciated. Thanks!

Not sure what applicaiton you are printing from but Adobe Acrobat has its own printer dialog box and options that may help.  For example if you nagivat to File > Print > Advanced you can play around with the Print as Image feature and the various DPI options that are available.  This is a similar feature as your Graphics to Text feature you reported using in the past.  The print driver will interperet the document differently which can lead to improvements in quality at the expense of other resources such as time or file size. 

PDF is an open format now so you may be able to try printing from other applications too.  See if any different apps behave differently for you.

You can also try to get your hands on a higher quality version of the original PDF.  Perhaps you are trying to print something that has been printed and scanned several times already.  The printer can only work with the source of the document that you provide it at the time so if data is missing then you may have to track down previous versions.  A quick test would be to generate a brand new PDF and play around with options from there.

[Emma1234567]

Thanks John! It's an original version of the PDF and the image above is the same PDF I'm using, so there definitely is a way to get it to fill in the text. I've tried both the HP dialog box and the Adobe Acrobat print settings and can never get it to print the way I can on our brother printing by changing the Print Setting option. I figure there has to be an equivalent setting in our HP printer but I can't seem to figure out what it is. This is for printing checks so unfortunately the bank won't accept them unless we can get the print quality higher. 

[John_Getzke]

> This is for printing checks so unfortunately the bank won't accept them unless we can get the print quality higher. 

Now your uploaded images have cleared the HP filters so I can see the problem.

This actually looks like it could be a font issue.  Almost as though there is an economode or something enabled on the HP driver that would be helpful for conserving toner. 

Check your Devices and Printers > Printer Preferences window under the Paper/Quality Tab and confirm that Economode is unchecked.  You can also play around with the Print Quality setting between the various DPIs that are available on your current driver.

If not then doublecheck and see if there are alternative fonts avaialble for the creation of your documents that meet your check criterea.  I know when we print MICR checks we have to use special HP printers and font families to pass the bank requirements.  More and more banks are not requiring MICR and allow normal image scanning for checks.  Not sure if you are using MICR or not but it might be worth looking into.