Greyscale! Is that so hard? Why can't I print in greyscale??

Factual Questions
1

I was recently given a printer/fax/scanner/copier by a friend. It’s a HP t65 and I like it much better than the Lexmark z82 it’s replacing. There is one small problem, however, and I was wondering if anyone here could help me.

I can’t get it to print in greyscale.

I use a program for work that generates documents in pdf format. The moron who wrote the program included a color logo and a light blue shaded area for contrast, so every time I print one of these basically disposable documents out (which I do a dozen times a day), it uses color ink. This means that over the course of a month or two, I will totally deplete my color cartridge pointlessly. I am disinclined to do this, as I work from home and have to replace them myself. Yea, they’re tax deductible, but still…

Anyway, a couple other twists to the story. The drivers that were installed when I plugged it in were in Spanish for some strange reason. At first I couldn’t figure out the greyscale option. I figured I’d reinstall new ones and solve that problem. Unfortunately, when I installed the new drivers, I started getting the message that the computer couldn’t talk to the printer. Hmmm. I poked around a bit to find out where the greyscale option was located ( so THAT’S what “Imprimir en escala de grises” means. Makes sense), and I find that the T series is know for compatibility problems with XP, no matter what HP says (or so the forums I visited would lead me to believe). Figuring I was ahead of the game before I tried to update the drivers, I did a system restore to this morning. The printer works again, but I can click the Imprimir en escala de grises option all day long and it STILL PRINTS IN COLOR!

I’m ready to weep.
Does anyone have any suggestions that might help?

There is one thing that it might be why the new drivers didn’t work, although I’ll be bumped if I can figure out why it would effect greyscale printing with the Spanish drivers that work otherwise. I don’t understand it, however, maybe someone can explain to me what this means. On the HP page that explains how to install the new drivers, it says at one point :

Now, I went where it said, but nowhere did I see a notation of “ECP” anywhere. That may be why the new drivers didn’t work, can anyone tell me what that means, and how to enable it?

2

I am assuming that you are using Windows. In XP you can select File — Print and then click the Properties button next to the printer at the top. That brings you to an option to print in B&W. You can do that each time you print the document if that suits you.

3

Virtually any computer made in recent years will have an ECP printer port. I’m not sure what the acronym stands for, but it means the ability for the computer and printer to have 2-way communication with each other.

Early parallel printer ports only supported 1-way communication from the computer to the printer, with very limited status reporting coming back the other way. The newer generation of parallel ports enables full duplex communications.

4
      • I don’t know of any way to get a color printer to print a color PDF in black+white; the whole point of PDF’s is that they are always supposed to display and print properly, in their intended colors… (?)
  • The only program I know of that can directly open and edit a PDF is Adobe Illustrator. With that, you could remove the graphic, flatten it to greyscale and then re-insert it. Or alternately, just use the grey graphic for generating future forms, if that is possible: just name the greyscale graphic the same name as the color one (over-writing it), and when the form is generated it should all come together.
    …
    Corel Draw might be able to edit PDF’s as well, I don’t know either way.

–You can mail me one of the forms if you got no other way to remove the graphic yourself, it takes all of about 30 seconds to do.
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5

The OP is asking for a simple thing that most all printer drivers can handle – to ignore color information coming from the original file and to print in grayscale (sometimes the option is listed as “Black and White”). The fact that a PDF is being printed doesn’t matter – the driver can be expected to handle grayscale printing with no issues.

Weirddave, there are two things you can try:

a) search on HP’s site (or somewhere else on the Net) for an older version of the driver. It might well work.

b) use Window’s generic printer driver.

6
      • Yes, and the printer drivers have issues with XP also. That feature might not work. Since this is just concerns a small number of forms, the easiest way would be to change the forms themselves.

  • If it was my problem the first thing I would try to do is install the drivers again–but do not uninstall the ones you have in the usual fashion, just (set a restore point) and use regedit and go through the registry manually, deleting any references to the printer’s model name or HP you find. Reboot and then reinstall the drivers in compatability mode for Win2K instead.

…Sometimes when you uninstall a program with its uninstaller, it leaves settings in the registry to try to be helpful in case you are just attempting to reinstall–but those settings being incorrect may well be the source of the problem. The only way to make sure all the settings are gone is to do it by hand.
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7

Are you able to remove the Color Cartridge and still have the machine print? Some printers allow this and warn you that they are on " black and white tones only ", some will not print at all. I know, it’s not a high-tech solution- but did you try this?

It’d save you the wasted color each time and protect the color cartridge for when you really need it.

Cartooniverse

8

ECP generally has to be enabled in the computer’s BIOS. When you’re booting up, before the operating system starts to load you’ll generally see something like “Hit <some key> to enter Setup”. Hit that key. Now, while in the system BIOS (and be very carefull here - if you don’t know what you’re doing you could potentially disable your system - DON’T mess with anything that says “enable password” for instance :)), you will generally want a section like “peripheral configuration” or something similar. You then want to poke around for the Parallel Port settings. Don’t mess with the IRQ or Port settings - you just want the type setting. On most systems, you’ll have choices like Standard, EPP, and ECP. Select ECP, save your changes, exit out of your BIOS’ setup program, and let the system reboot. Generally (I don’t remember for XP - all my XP machines have USB printers now :wink: ), Windows will detect the new ECP parallel port setting and install it.

Of course, if your printer is USB, this whole above discussion is moot :slight_smile:

Also, if you’re using localized versions of a driver on an OS that is a different language, it’s not surprising that you are having some strange issues - a lot of times (not always, though) it depends on the amount of localization done to the driver itself and whether any internal code was localized, or just the displayed text was localized, for instance.

9

This advice did the trick. Thank you.