Die Mother Printer, Die.

By Emily Spirek on September 24, 2010 at 9:18 am in Fun Friday!,General,Video

After being a faithful printer for several years, our HP all-in-one slowly failed us until a power outage finally took its life. By that time, we all resented it anyway, so we made a little video to show our disdain.

Many should recognize the reference to the Office Space printer scene, but we had Erick Alexander Music create a custom and more appropriate song for our video.

We definitely have no regrets and it was actually quite liberating. In fact, we’re thinking of framing the bat and hanging it in our office. Also, please don’t try this at home (we had highly trained actors).

Why Acrobat is better for printing and our story behind it

By Emily Spirek on April 19, 2010 at 10:57 am in General

Adobe Acrobat vs. Preview (on a Mac)

Yesterday, our power glitched while Tim was in a meeting, and when he came in the office to make a copy, we discovered the printer was fried. In all attempts to turn it back on, we still failed.

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Fried Printer

So, even though we had been researching color laser printers the past few months, we didn’t realize we’d be forced into buying one.

We made our trip to Staples and came back with an HP Color Laserjet. So pretty…

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Brand New Color Laser printer

Anyway, now we are testing the printer to see if it’s worth keeping, and we noticed a lot of detail was missing in the printouts (when printing from Tim’s computer). Of course, our first thought is to blame the printer and consider getting a refund, but then Elyssa (one of the designers) printed from her computer, and it looked perfect in detail and color.

After more experimentation, I finally came up with the solution: different applications were being used to view and print the PDFs.

You can see the comparison below:

Adobe Acrobat PDF – screen view (left)

Preview PDF – screen view (right)

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Notice the detail in the calculator is missing in Preview.

Adobe Acrobat printout (left)

Preview printout (right)

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The printouts show even more problems when using Preview:

1. Detail in the calculator is still missing
2. Colors are muddy
3. Lines in text and images are jagged
4. The entire document is larger

Preview’s default is to scale the images so it fits the screen. This throws off the proportion of the document and leads to other problems.

Through more experimentation, we found that Adobe Acrobat takes longer for the documents to print, but rightfully so. It obviously pays closer attention to detail and prints more accurately. I’ve yet to research the technical details as to why Acrobat is better, but so far we just have the proof.

Along with all of the other features included, like: password encrypting, print production features, electronic fillable forms, etc. (in Acrobat Professional), I’ve finally decided to switch to Acrobat as my default PDF viewer. It may take longer in some cases, but accuracy in printing makes it all worth it.