[Solved] Printing problem with graphics in OOo Writer

[Hagar de l'Est]

I edit a newsletter for my local astronomy club. The first page has our club's logo. It is circular, but when I print the newsletter, the logo stretches into a vertical oval shape. Other graphics don't do this, and the logo appears circular when I view the page on my monitor.

I use the "Picture" properties to adjust the logo's size, shape and position, but the result is always the same. My printer is an HP Deskjet 6540, using a 64-bit driver.

Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance,

Roy

[Hagar de l'Est]

As a workaround, see if exporting to PDF helps.

Else, you can try to change the anchoring of the pic.

[rtroxel]

When I print to a PDF (with PDF995), the logo looks just fine. But when I print the PDF through my laserjet, it becomes an oval! I've changed the logo's anchoring a few times, from "page" to "character", with the same results. I should add that it appears the same through other peoples' printers as well.

The newsletter is distributed through email, so it must be in PDF format, but whenever anybody prints it out, that logo stretches to an oval.

- Roy

[RoryOF]

Presumably you have the logo in a separate file? If you select that in any other application, such as the system Image Viewer, does it print OK?

I think the image you have may have been scanned, perhaps using a Fax machine as the scanner. I've seen this distortion before (c 1988!) when stuff was scanned in a fax machine (real scanners costing $000s at the time), with 200 dpi horizontally and 100 dpi vertically, and a flag set somewhere to say "double every vertical line".

[rtroxel]

Yes, it might have been scanned. Good point.

I looked for and found the original image. The circular logo was actually flattened vertically about 7%. To change this, I had used Paint Shop Pro's Image/Resize command to expand the image vertically about 7%. For some reason, printers expanded it another 7%, resulting in the printed logo appearing stretched vertically by that amount! Even after I had transferred the OO text to PDF format!

After several trials, I decided to use OO's "Picture" feature to insert the original flattened logo onto the newsletter page, but this time, I expanded it 7% vertically using the Picture command, not Paint Shop Pro. I then converted the text to PDF, printed it on the laserjet and the logo kept its shape.