: How to avoid uneven lines and moirée in printed hatches? When printing thin diagonal hatches on inkjet or laser printers, the lines often become uneven in terms of line width. The effect varies

@Kimberly620

It is simply called aliasing. On a laser printer theres not much you can do about it. It simply happens because you are very close to the actual resolution of the printer.

Yes aliasing is highly dependent on exact implementation details of the printer and the size of the actual dots the printer uses. Printers can not really smooth lines though, they may have all kinds of tricks up the on the actual printing level. Inkjets are almost impossible to do anything about in this case.

If you want to do something about this then you can not use vectors you must actually make a bitmap on the native resolution of the printer. Most likely this means writing machine specific printer code. OR you use a printer with MUCH much more resolution.

Calirification

I am not saying one can not do this. I am just saying one can not do this easily through the general printing abstraction. What you want isn't well handled by the abstraction layer, because that's what we want the abstraction to handle. This is the price we pay for having the ability to plug any number of printers to nearly any machine. You can send instructions to the actual printer that does just this.

For example you can send a hairline instruction in postscript. But illustrator can not send hairlines out (Corel can in certain printer drivers). But even with this it does not guarantee that the space between hairlines is constant and does not in fact jump one dot here and one there.

Like i said you can send direct code the the printers too, now you need to write it in a text editor. So for example if you REALLY REALLy want to do this then you can. However it will only work with printers that have same programming interface. For example its possible to send a halftone handler in postscript, this one has the ability to do this. Only it dont work if there is a suitable RIP in between*.

* like at my work. But then, thats also good, I or some student can no longer upload a joke function that mirrors every 10:th uneven page. Which admittedly was hilarious when bound to a check to see who the person printing was. Admittedly IT didn't think it was so funny.

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