Highlighted Word text is almost unreadable when printed

[francescob]

I've highlighted several parts of a Word document but, despite everything being perfectly readable on screen, when I print the document the colors are entirely different. I've tried all the available colors but except for yellow all of them are printed so dark that they make even black text unreadable. Is there any way to change those default colors or to tell word to not screw them up when printing?

[+BudMan MVC]

Can you take a picture/scan, what printer are you using?

So for example I have word document - inserted some random text. Highlighted some of it

Then printed it - here are pretty much default settings on my HL-3170cdw printer

And here I scanned the print - very easy to see the highlighted text, etc..

[francescob]

I have an OfficeJet 8600 Pro on Normal quality. I tried printing a sample document and scanning it but the scanner makes it way much brighter than it is.

Yellow is perfectly readable, the other light colors (green/cyan/gray) are much, much darker and on the paper the text underneath is hardly readable. I would use shading instead if it wasn't a mess to use in tables, bullet lists, etc.

[+BudMan MVC]

Have you tried increase quality, turn off print/toner save mode, etc. Have you don't any calibration of colors in the driver?

example in my driver

[francescob]

  On 29/11/2014 at 13:48, BudMan said:

Have you tried increase quality, turn off print/toner save mode, etc. Have you don't any calibration of colors in the driver?

example in my driver

colorcal.png

colormange.png

Increasing the quality only makes it worse since it uses more ink. Also, the driver doesn't seem to ship with any ICC profile nor allow calibration other than head aligning. I'm pretty sure that 16-color palettes were printed that way on most if not all the HP printers I've owned back from the 720c in 1997. Could you please try printing a couple of lines with the light green and cyan colors to see how they look?

[+BudMan MVC]

Well they clearly do not match colors.. But other then the dark blue they are readable. The green is bit too dark, grey is ok though.

[Ian S.]

Could your printer be running out of ink?

[Torolol]

is it word problem or printer problem?

I would try printscren it, and print the result from ms-paint.

[+BudMan MVC]

^ actually that is a good suggestion.. Clearly the colors do not match screen and output. Lets see how it looks from printing from image viewer. I will try this when I get home.

[francescob]

  On 01/12/2014 at 05:24, ians18 said:

Could your printer be running out of ink?

If the ink was running out there would be lighter stripes, everything else seems fine for now.

 

  On 01/12/2014 at 05:41, Torolol said:

is it word problem or printer problem?

I would try printscren it, and print the result from ms-paint.

 

  On 02/12/2014 at 19:15, BudMan said:

^ actually that is a good suggestion.. Clearly the colors do not match screen and output. Lets see how it looks from printing from image viewer. I will try this when I get home.

 

If I do printscreen it's printed exactly like Word prints it (text almost unreadable). The problem feels like a RGB-CMYK conversion mess to me: if you open Photoshop, paste a screenshot of that text and press CTRL+Y (to switch to CMYK mode without conversion) you can clearly see the colors becoming just like the printed ones. BTW thanks for the tests.