B/W Mac printing is back?

[Thomas Holm]

On the excellent Macsurfer
site I found this link to a Mac OS X Hints tip:
10.3: Apply Quartz filters to print jobs"

(Scroll down the page and you'll find it)

It appears that this means that B/W printing is back in Panther, at least for the printer mentioned.

Can anyone confirm this? Does it work for other printers? Postscript? And, does it work in Archicad? Plotmaker? Or is it Cocoa only?

Please check - I don't have Panther yet.

Thomas

[Thomas Holm]

I am an url.

[Aussie John]

short answer is no- Colours are still printed as greyscale ( to HP post script laser printer

[Djordje]

Thomas wrote:
I found out how to link directly to the MacOSX Hint in question!
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20031027180428655
But for the lazy ones 😉 Here's the text:

I was installing and testing my HP printer on Panther today and noticed that there are a few new options tucked away in the Print dialog (I mean besides the fax!). For one, the Colorsync pop-up panel brings up the ability to apply Quartz filters to print jobs. There are seven built in filters, as seen in the screenshot, plus the ability to create your own (Add Filters). Upon creating your own, the Color Sync utility fires up and gives you a bevy of options to filter your print jobs and integrate them into a PDF workflow.

Definitely one of the unsung features to be found in Panther.

[robg adds: The ColorSync Utility (which lives in Utilities) seems to be a very powerful little app, showing you the effect of the various filters as they're applied, along with a slew of other options. Even if (like me!) you're not a graphics wizard, it's worth checking out at least once.]

And here's the picture:

Going to Tips now; the message is quoted fully in order not to break the discussion.

[Thomas Holm]

Please note that this tip still needs confirmation from someone who has Panther.

Please test it in both Archicad 8.1, 7v3, Plotmaker, and with both non-postscript inkjets and large-format primters, as well as Postscript printers.

I think we Mac users would benefit from thourough testing of this feature.

There's another thread that poimts to possible problems with printing from Plotmaker on the G5 - this might be related.

(And Djordje, should the tip proove to be bad, please remove it from the tips and trick section)

Thanks!

Thomas Holm

[Anonymous]

Thomas wrote:
Please note that this tip still needs confirmation from someone who has Panther.

Please test it in both Archicad 8.1, 7v3, Plotmaker, and with both non-postscript inkjets and large-format primters, as well as Postscript printers.

Does NOT work from AC7 under 10.3 to an HP Laserjet 8150 via PostScript.

[Thomas Holm]

nathan wrote:

Thomas wrote:
Please note that this tip still needs confirmation from someone who has Panther.

Please test it in both Archicad 8.1, 7v3, Plotmaker, and with both non-postscript inkjets and large-format primters, as well as Postscript printers.

Does NOT work from AC7 under 10.3 to an HP Laserjet 8150 via PostScript.

Well, here the Colorsync filters in Panther work with all printers that use a standard postscript OSX printer driver (some variation of Laserwriter) and a printer-specific pdf file. Example: Our Xerox color laser. (expensive, but worth every penny - and I'm not bought by Xerox /yet 😉

But this is a system option. It works by using some threshold value: If a color is darker than XX, it will print, otherwise not. Light yellow lines don't print.

This makes it less suitable for Archicad, where the most useful option is the one we had before, similar to Plotmaker's 'all pens to black' option: ALL colors that are different from white print black, period.

It could be possible for some guru to create a ColorSync filter that did this. Until someone does, we'll have to live whith what we've got: Plotmaker's the only way to get all lines black on the Mac.

[__archiben]

Thomas wrote:
It could be possible for some guru to create a ColorSync filter that did this. Until someone does, we'll have to live whith what we've got: Plotmaker's the only way to get all lines black on the Mac.

you mean like this, (attached)?

place it in: ~/Library/Filters/ (if the folder doesn't exist, create one)

it's not perfect, but does pick up the light yellows and print to a darkish grey . . .

thanks to andy 'guru' harle (my colleague), with a final wee tweak from myself of course

~/archiben

[SeaGeoff]

What happens when you select the All Colors to Black option in the ArchiCAD pane of the print dialog?

I just tried this, outputting only to PDF. All lines go black, colored fills go black but gray fills stay gray.

I get pretty much the same result with the B/W quartz filter except the gray fills go white.

[Thomas Holm]

Ben,

I really appreciate your work. I didn't notice your post until today.

However, it seems the filters don't make much difference when printing from AC7. Looks like the program bypasses Colorsync someway. I'd guess it uses an old OS9 routine, just Carbonized to exist in OSX. (Just like most of AC7. - I know, I WILL upgrade, it's just that...)

Thanks!

Thomas