laser printing eps' looks awful

[web-kitten]

Hi, I'm 6 months into OSX and still frustrated!

We just got a new Epson Aculaser C8600. I know its a great printer but I just can't get eps' to print smoothly when printing in Quark. They're sort of textured/pixelated. If I print from Illustrator they're fine but we need to print from Quark for short print runs. And I told my boss we could do it! Help!

I downloaded the driver from the Epson site and its loaded up properly, print monitor, etc although I can't seem to print separations or bleed either! When I try the PPD Manager it doesn't show any C8600 ppd in that file - and I can't find one anywhere. Is it different on OSX? What happened to just dragging and dropping bits between Extensions etc - that was so easy!

Please please help me.

 

[CaptainQuark]

Hi Web Kitten,

Printing eps files can be fraught. First question to ask yourself is: "Is the Epson Aculaser a PostScript printer?" If it isn't, then you will unfortunately have to consider converting the pix to another format, such as TIFF, instead or consider creating PDFs out of Quark and printing from there.

You say that it works fine out of Illustrator, so it sounds like it's just Quark being awkward.

Look in your main Library Folder (not your User Library) in Printers/PPDs/Contents/Resources/en.lproj. There you should find drivers for the printers you currently have installed on your system. If you can see a driver there for your Aculaser, copy it and create a new folder in your User/Documents folder (call it what you like, but I'm a big fan of giving names that mean something, so I would suggest calling "My Auxiliary Printers" or similar) and copy the driver into it.

Then go back into Quark and open the PPD Manager. Down at the bottom of the dialog box, there is a button "Use Auxiliary Folder". Click on that and add the Aculaser driver from the new folder you have created. Quit and restart QuarkXPress. The new printer should be visible – hopefully.

Hope that helps!