Troubleshooting poor print quality

[Mike Paul]

On Sun, 06 Jun 2004 14:21:15 +0000, Anonymous wrote:

> For resolution related problems, you could try to add the following PPD statements in your PPD file ('/etc/cups/ppd/your_printer.ppd') :
> 
> *OpenUI *Resolution/Resolution: PickOne
> *OrderDependency: 20 AnySetup *Resolution
> *DefaultResolution: 600dpi
> *Resolution 150dpi/150 ppp: "<</HWResolution[150 150]/cupsColorOrder 0/cupsColorSpace 3/cupsCompression 2>>setpagedevice"
> *Resolution 300dpi/300 ppp: "<</HWResolution[300 300]/cupsColorOrder 0/cupsColorSpace 3/cupsCompression 2>>setpagedevice"
> *Resolution 600dpi/600 ppp: "<</HWResolution[600 600]/cupsColorOrder 0/cupsColorSpace 3/cupsCompression 2>>setpagedevice"
> *CloseUI: *Resolution

Well, that fixed the resolution problem...  the output looks quite nice
now.  :-)

The remaining problem is that the output is positoned too high on the page
-- there's extra blank space on the bottom which would be matched by an
equal amount of blank space on the top if I were printing on A4 paper, but
I'm using US Letter (and my /etc/papersize says "letter") so it's
vertically off-center.

I've seen this before, when looking at output from TeX, both in
GhostScript and on an actual PostScript printer.  Since it occurred with
two different PostScript interpreters, I figured it was an issue with
TeX's "dvips" converter, but got into the habit of putting a PaperSize
directive into my TeX jobs and never got around to tracking down the cause
of the problem.  Now the same symptom is occurring in the output from
CUPS's "texttops", which means it's not a bug in dvips after all, but I
have no idea what's causing it.
-- 

Mike Paul
mbp2 at lehigh.edu
http://www.lehigh.edu/~mbp2/