When printing a repeated sequence like 'abababababab...', the space between each 'a' and its following 'b' may not be consistent due to letter shapes being rounded to fit the pixel matrix. Even with a 1200-dpi laser printer, these slight differences can be significant enough to make test printing for spacing & kerning unreliable. For instance, when printing 'HHXOHH HHXQHH', the 'XO' might look fine while the 'XQ' appears to have too much space, even though the O and the Q share the exact same left side.
What do you do then?
Comments
https://typedrawers.com/discussion/3560/printer-for-proofing
However, I don't believe that its quality has much to do with the issue at hand. Except for very specific fonts sizes, those slight differences in spacing between letters cannot be avoided. The printer essentially rounds an arithmetic sequence of non-whole numbers, which doesn't necessarily result in an arithmetic sequence (e.g. 2.21, 3.31, 4.41, 5.51, 6.61, 7.71 -> 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, note the jump from 4 to 6).
If you want to see the kerning for specific pairs, I'd say just print it out bigger, put in on a wall and take a few steps back.
If you want to see the overall color of the text, print it at text size and forget about minute differences.
The precision you want seems like a little bit overkill to me
@James Puckett, I think I'm going to take your advice and move on...
@Igor Freiberger, the B400 specs say "up to 1200 x 1200 dpi (enhanced)" while the C500 sepcs say "up to 1200 x 2400 dpi". I'm wondering what "enhanced" means and what the effect of the jump from 1200 to 2400 dpi, in just one axis, is.
I had a HP with 1200x1200 that was barely better than another HP with 600x600. And a Brother (HL-L2360DW) with 1200x1200 which is superior to any HP. But no printer I had compares to the C500 regarding text quality.
Like: printing with variable fonts from a non-design app that just uses the PostScript driver directly without writing its own PS, and printing that directly to a PostScript device in PS mode, is reportedly Very Bad still. AFAIK.
It may well be the case. But it might be otherwise, Chris: at a designer’s suggestion, a company gets some licenses of A-Very-Pro-Font, and one of them is for an employee who uses the font to write some documents in a non-design app and even prints them. I mean, the employee actually didn’t buy the type, but somehow he is able to use it.
Basically it is just that some apps that are savvy enough to inject their own added stuff into the PostScript stream or otherwise bypass the driver in whole or in part (functionality the Windows PostScript driver is designed to allow) can work around the problem. So for example InDesign and Illustrator can work around the problem, and I assume apps like Figma and Quark do as well.
Text set in 8, 7, and 6pt. No special configuration. Regular stock paper (white, A4, 90g/m²). My mobile is an old iPhone SE 1st gen, so the photos suffer from lack of better quality. Actual paper is brighter and whiter than the images, but I decided keep them without further changes.
Font is Laboratorium, still with only partial kerning.