Hiya. I'm not new to Linux but I've only just set up a printer for the first time with it. It's an HP Deskjet 5740. I'm using CUPS and it works well in so far as I can send stuff to print, and it gets printed. However, printed text tends to end up looking different to how it appears on-screen. For example, if I open up KEdit and print out some plain text, the printout is plain ugly, with the text being printed in a very heavy font. If I print a document in KWord (word processor) the results are better. The document is printed in the expected font (i.e. the same font as on the screen). However, even in this case the printed text is not perfect. It is somewhat bigger than it appears on screen, and is therefore not particularly elegant.

My question is, is there any way I can get my printed text to look just as it appears on-screen, as would be the case were I printing from Windows? Or is this a quirk I'm going to have to learn to live with?

Well have you looked in the kde control centre>peripherals>printers ?? There may be a way of setting the default font there.

Or you might have to dig through the documentation for KEdit too see about setting fonts for that app.

Or have you thought about using an office suite? OpenOffice.org, where you can set the font in the same way as you might for MS office.

Applications that you can print from, usually allow you to set the font for them. Though there may be a system default that is "pig ugly".

Maybe as you're using debian, you should see if theres a .deb that you can install for "corefonts" which are the MS core fonts and contain the "free" MS fonts like Arial, Times New Roman etc etc - the proprietary ones e.g. Tahoma, can only be used legally if you have a windows licence somewhere.

The gentoo package is just called "corefonts", but under debian it maybe called "MScorefonts".

regards

John

I'm not really having problems getting things printed in the right font. Like I said, using KWord (which is part of an office suite, KOffice), everything prints in the right font. It looks pretty much correct only that on the printed page it looks a bit enlarged. I know I'm probably just being a perfectionist, but if there's a way I can get the printed text to look almost identical to how it appears on the screen as is possible in Windows, I'd like to find it.

Yes, it does pain me to use Windows as an example of the behaviour I want...

Well, surely, if you have, say Arial, set as your screen font, as well as the documents font (so thats what it uses when it prints) it _should_ (theoretically) look the same????

Unless you haven't got some of those little "fonty" type things switched on e.g. anti-aliasing and the like.

Sorry, thats about all I can think of. Though it's of no worry too me if you wish to use windows in your analogy - I'm only a linux user for social, moral and ethical reasons.

regards

John

This won't solve your problem but if im not misstaken then this is a issue that Cairo tries
to solve that is the final result should like identical whatever the backend may be
(X11, OpenGL, printed, pdf et.c.).