[cups] B&W pictures with colored grays

[Helge Blischke]

> Am 18.04.2018 um 18:07 schrieb Rolf-Werner Eilert <rwe-sse at osnanet.de>:
> 
> In regular intervals I have to print some documentation including black and white pictures. It is a 16 pages document, mostly text, colored text and some color pictures and some black and white pictures. The PDF is from Scribus.
> 
> Up to now I used to print from Windows. Adobe Reader's printing dialog is set to "Text & Foto", so if there are black and white pictures (only gray channel), the printer prints them with the black toner only. The pages print fast, but the printer will accept only one document at a time. I cannot use the Number of Copies setting to let it print 10 copies, but have to send one copy 10 times to line up in the queue.
> 
> Now I have a new Linux system (we already discussed about another item with it) which could print these documents too. It even delivers sharper prints, but it has two drawbacks:
> 
> 1) It seems to print the whole page as a picture which results in loooong printing times. But I can use Number of Copies, it will print all 10 copies in one go.
> 
> 2) It prints black and white pictures with a bit of color toner, mainly red, so these pictures have a light warm shimmer. And that wastes a lot of red toner...
> 
> I have been trying around with different settings in the printing dialog, but to no avail. Does anyone here know a special setting which lets it print like on the Windows side?
> 
> Thanks for all hints.
> 
> Regards
> Rolf
> _______________________________________________

First, Scribus prints to PostScript (at least the latest version), the language level (1, 2, or 3) is selectable. So, if your pages
are really printed as images, it must be due to one of the filters in the CUPS filter chain (look at the options supported by the
filters of the cups-filters package, which, I think, is used on your Linux installation.

Look at the cupsaddons page at sosurceforge.net <http://sosurceforge.net/>. There is a filter named colorfilter that takes account for just your black printing
problem, but it operates on PostScript streams only.

Perhaps you can post one of the PDFs in question to me.

Helge