regular (non-bold) text is printed dark gray, not black

[wulfila]

Hi,

I'm evaluating vDos for some digital archeology (printing old WP and Q&A Write files).

It's a great tool. When printing from vDos, however, I noticed that regular (non-bold) text is not printed black, but dark gray [rgb(64,64,64) to be precise].

I'm using default print settings on LPT1. I determined the color by printing to CutePDF, but that does not seem to be the cause. The output is not monochrome even printed directly to a real printer.

At first I thought it was caused by the software I used (Symantec Q&A, WordPerfect 5.x), but the issue can easily be reproduced with a simple DOS command:

echo TEST > LPT1

Is this by design? The dark gray vs. black bold color scheme actually looks really nice on screen (PDF), but is not so good when printing to a monochrome laser printer.

Can vDos be configured to print black only? I read Printing.pdf and tried Google, but couldn't find an answer.

Thanks,

Tom De Herdt

[Jos]

vDos’ internal TTF font misses a bold typeface. So that is indeed mimicked by printing in black for bold, opposed to dark gray for regular text.
I personally like this for a hardcopy, not as much with PDF’s; the bold text doesn’t really stand out on screen.
You could select a different font with a bold typeface for printing, however regular text is still printed as dark gray.

The internal font of the next vDos version will have a bold typeface. That can optionally also be used for the text in a vDos window.


For now, if an alternative font doesn’t do, use an external DOS-to-Windows print processor as mentioned in Printing.pdf.

Jos

[wulfila]

OK, I see. I tried Consolas, but as you explain that doesn't change the color for regular text.

I'll try an external print processor. As an alternative, I looked for pdf software that converts grayscale text to monochrome, but this seems surprisingly hard to do.

Looking forward to try the next vDos version.

Just to be sure: are you implying that the next version (with bold typeface) will no longer print gray regular text?
Or could this conceivably become a setting in the configuration file, since both gray/black and monochrome would be appealing/useful options, depending on use case?

Anyway, thank you for a very fast response indeed.

Regards, Tom

[Jos]

The next version will indeed print all text in black.
Although I prefer simulated regular as dark gray and bold as plain black for hard copies, I don’t think I’ll add options to set one or both differently.

Jos

[emendelson]

If you use vDosWP (found at wpdos.org/vdoswp.html ) you can print (or create PDFs) from WordPerfect in black. It should be adaptable to Q&A Write, though easiest if you use a PCL printer driver.

[wulfila]

Jun 14, 2020 19:05:23 GMT 1 Jos said:

The next version will indeed print all text in black.
Although I prefer simulated regular as dark gray and bold as plain black for hard copies, I don’t think I’ll add options to set one or both differently.

Jos

OK, I understand it may be technically non-trivial or just not worth the effort to add another option.

As for the simulated regular/bold: I agree it does look good very on screen (e.g. in a PDF) and even on paper when printed professionally, as pure black on white may be tiring to the eyes.

On a basic monochrome laser printer though, the dithered grays can be distracting since they clearly look less crisp than the high-res black/bold text.

(Surprisingly, it does add a nostalgic touch to some old documents, the dithered letters – in toner saving mode at least – weirdly reminiscent of the matrix printer they were written for decades ago!)

Tom

[wulfila]

Jun 14, 2020 19:15:15 GMT 1 emendelson said:

If you use vDosWP (found at wpdos.org/vdoswp.html ) you can print (or create PDFs) from WordPerfect in black. It should be adaptable to Q&A Write, though easiest if you use a PCL printer driver.

Yes, thank you. I tried vDosWP and the prints were monochrome, but I had some trouble with non-ASCII characters. I'm sure it can be fixed, but overall I prefer the simplicity of vDos (and vDosPlus for that matter). It simply works out-of-the-box, without needing an installer, nicely isolated from the host OS.

But I certainly would consider vDosWP if I only had to convert WP documents. Most of the project is Q&A and dBaseIII though.

Tom

[Jos]

We actually disagree. I prefer the simulated regular/bold for a hardcopy. An actual bold typeface just dominates too much.
In a PDF, simulated bold is however hard to distinguish from regular. So if anything to set, I would go for simulated bold/regular for hardcopies, while using a bold typeface and all black for PDF’s.
If a printer doesn’t support actual gray scaling, dithering dark gray regular will indeed not be that nice. But printing a hardcopy will also be used less and less.

Jos

[wulfila]

Jos: you're right, we do disagree after all. I was misled by the fact that I also like the gray/black scheme, but I prefer it on screen in PDF, not on paper – no doubt simply because it doesn't look very good on my printer.
As for PDF: I printed my sample files with Consolas, so I have the combined effect of color contrast and weight.
Now that I come to think of it (it has been a few weeks since I generated the samples), I chose Consolas precisely because of the ‘real’ boldface, even though I thought the vDos typeface was more pleasant to read.
Sorry for the misunderstanding.

Tom