WD: Gray Drawing Layer Lines Printed in Black on HP LaserJet

• Microsoft Word for Windows, versions 6.0, 6.0a, 6.0c
• Microsoft Word for Windows 95, versions 7.0, 7.0a
• Microsoft Word 97 for Windows

SYMPTOMS

Word 7.x, 97

When you create a gray-colored line for a drawing object (using the *tools on the Drawing toolbar in Word for Windows), the line may be printed in black on Hewlett-Packard (HP) LaserJet series printers. This behavior occurs with circles, ellipses, squares, arcs, freeform objects and autoshapes (Word 97 only).

Word 6.x

When you create a gray-colored line for a drawing object (using the *tools on the Drawing toolbar in Word for Windows), the line may be printed in black on Hewlett-Packard (HP) LaserJet series printers. This behavior occurs with lines, circles, squares, arcs, and freeform shapes; and *with ellipses when you use a Windows 95 printer driver.

CAUSE

Word sends correct gray color instructions to the printer driver, which means Word is not responsible for this behavior. Some versions of the *HP LaserJet Series printer drivers translate gray color formatting to *black printer instructions for all shapes except the ellipse (except when *using the Windows 95 printer driver).

Specifically, when a non-ellipse is formatted as gray, the printer *driver sends a NULL brush and solid pen (pen width = 0) instruction, which *tells the printer to print in black instead of gray. In contrast, for a gray- colored ellipse, the printer driver sends a brush instruction that corresponds to the Windows Universal Printer Driver (Unidrv.dll) instruction for dithered solid red color, which the HP LaserJet printer prints as gray.

This problem may occur with the following printers:

   HP LaserJet
   HP LaserJet II
   HP LaserJet IIp+
   HP LaserJet III
   HP LaserJet IIIp
   HP LaserJet IIIsi
   HP LaserJet 4M/4P (HPPCL5E.DRV version 1.27)
   HP LaserJet 4si (HPPCL5E.DRV version 1.27)
   HP LaserJet 4si MX (HPPCL5E.DRV version 1.27)
   HP LaserJet 4si version 3.78 (Windows 95 printer driver)

WORKAROUND

To work around this problem use any of the following methods:

Method 1: Depending on the type of drawing object needed, it may be

          possible to create the object that uses a gray fill, but to which
          you do not add a line color. Gray-colored object fills print
          correctly. For example, to create a gray-colored line, create
          instead a narrow rectangle that has no lines and uses a gray
          fill.

          driver.

STATUS

For a possible solution, please see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

 ARTICLE-ID: Q130508
 TITLE     : Non-white Text or Graphics Printed in Black