Faded Fonts when Printing Slides

[Guest]

I'm working with PowerPoint 2000 and printing to a B&W Laser Printer and
later a Color Laser Printer.

The fonts in the PowerPoint slides are either Automatically assign by
PowerPoint are are chosen to be a dark color assumed to be black.

The fonts look black on the screen and through projection, but fade to a
light gray when printed.

What's funny, there is a few slides that present black, and print black. I
don't know what the difference is and how to get them to be the same.

P.S. I'm gathering slides from about 20 different people who are not power
users of PowerPoint. They just fumble around to get the slide done.

 

[Bill Dilworth]

Couple of thoughts:

1) What are the actual colors assigned to these faded fonts? Select the
text, then select Format -> Fonts -> Color -> More Colors -> Custom and read
the actual Red, Green and Blue color settings for the font color. Black is
0,0,0 while dark gray may be anything up to about 75,75,75.

2) Check the 'Black and white' as well as the 'gray scale' color setting.
If you are printing to a black and white printer, PowerPoint automatically
selects this mode for printing. One or more of the users my have
inadvertently set these settings to something unexpected. Usually they are
al set to automatic. To display black and white view, select View ->
Color/Gray Scale ... -> Black And White.

3) Similarly, the automatic setting on the black and white/gray scale views
may be trying to help with the visual clarity of the printout. Is the text
against something that is black?

--
Bill Dilworth
Microsoft PPT MVP Team
===============
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answer most of our questions, before com
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Change org to com to defuse anti-spam,
ant-virus, anti-nuisance misdirection.
..
..

 

[Guest]

Thanks Bill,

I went through all three options with no change. I did not a trend. If a
text box is created on the slide, the text is black. But if the text box was
on the slide, its faded. The other thing I have notice is the MS EXCEL
sheets that were "copy-picture" bmp and pasted into the presentation are also
faded.

I've check serveral of the fonts and they have 0 0 0 with a Hue of 170. The
same for faded and not-faded text.

 

[Bill Dilworth]

Interesting...

Did you also check the Master slide's text boxes' gray scale settings?

Have you installed the latest printer drivers and video drivers from the
manufacturers websites? I don't know if this will help, but should always
be at the beginning of a problem solving session.

Bill D.

 

[Steve Rindsberg]

Do you have a web site or ftp area where you could post an example PPT file
(preferably one that's been trimmed down to just one or two slides that
demonstrate the problem)? If so, post the URL here so a couple of us can have a
look.

Also, let us know what specific printer and driver version your'e using.