My Canon Pixna MX860 cannot be set to print background colours. I know this because Canon have told me so. This is no good when you want to print tables in which the individual cells have different background colours (like for example the TrackSat satellite data tables). It seems such an obvious thing that people might want to do. Are there any printers that can do it ?
Jim Hawkins
If it's just an occasional thing for reference, take a screen shot and print that?
I would have thought that's more of a configuration or temporary setting for the application in question, not the printer driver.
E.g. Internet Explorer
What's your source documents?
???
You mean a stoopid employee at Canon fobbed you off.
that's more down to the printer driver. But I cant imagine that any driver cant print color if the printer is capable of it.
All of them?
Tried that, but the resolution's too poor - and TrackSat has many pages.
Go to :
Is it possible that Canon were answering a slightly different question from the one you asked?
Most modern printers can produce text in two (or more) different ways. At the simplest level the computer needs only send the ASCII characters, and the printer will print them using its own internal fonts etc. There will be a limited number of effects that can also be selected via control sequences - change in typeface, bold, underline etc. Now in this mode its quite likely that the printer can't add a background colour to the text.
However when printing from modern OSs, most printer drivers will do the rasterisation (i.e. the conversion from the mathematical descriptions of the font outlines etc into a pattern of dots) on the host computer itself rather than relying on the printer, and then send the raw pixel data to the printer. When printing like that, I can't see how a printer could manage to avoid printing a background colour - it would look exactly the same to it as any other stream of pixels.
Indeed. Note that some software will include options to print or hide background information when printing.
I am not aware of any modern inkjets that can't (and that would most likely include yours)
No problem.. on IE9 just select and then go to settings and tick the box marked "print background..".
Yup, no problem.
In Firefox, go to Page Setup and ensure that "Print Background (colours & images)" is ticked, click ok, then print as normal.
(nothing to do with the printer really)
(copying and pasting the table into Word etc will also retain the background shading)
No such box to tick here (Linux) :-)
oh. it's in about:config
That seems to work..
eggs actly
After I posted that, the thought did occur to me that the linux one may be different... So I did try looking, but the Ubunto virtual machine I was hacking about with seems to have thrown a wobbly on its virtual disk, and the Suse install I had was so ancient I can't even remember its admin password to install a version of FF that is not geriatric. ;-)
Handy to know.
On my Firefox 11.0 Ubuntu
File:Print:Options: Print Background Colours
ah. so it is.
In Safari, when you go to print there's a tickbox labelled "Print backgrounds". I ticks that and it prints the backgrounds. On a Canon iP4000.
You're being a bit naive, Jim-lad.
Click on Print Screen and then open a graphics program, click on 'open from clipboard' or similar. Then print.
Bill
Thanks to Adrian for pointing me to the background options in Internet Explorer. These worked in that they turned background prining on, but showed that in IE (at least) there is a residual problem, in that it can't distinguish between the background in cells of a table and that of the document as a whole For anyone who wants to see this, try printing a page from
Jim Hawkins
version of IE for OS X. But I printed it to a PDF in Safari and it looks fine. Time to change your browser?
Jim Hawkins :
different style for print and screen? ICBA to examine that page to see whether that's what's actually happening in this case, but it's quite possible for the page to ask the browser for a coloured background when displayed on a screen but not when printed. And I'd expect IE to honour that. Possibly.
ah. That was an option in Firefox I think.
Install firefox and bin IE I would. Its free.
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