On 13/03/2024 02:50, jeremy ardley wrote:
Getting back to pixel registration, the latex CUPS route is very unlikely to work well.
TeX with MetaFont fonts worked well with low resolution dot matrix printers. Rasterized fonts may be generated for specified resolution. It should be still possible unless wide Unicode coverage is required.
I may be wrong, but I have impression that better support of modern vector fonts (TTF, OTF, etc.) in LuaTeX has other side. HurfBuz font library with priority to speed can not align characters to specified pixel grid. Likely nobody cares concerning font hints for low resolution devices.
Scale and position of images like QR codes should be adjusted to printer resolution.
More than a decade ago it was necessary to provide a document for archival purposes. I got a couple of complains: font with too thin lines and gray rather than black toner. The cartridge was refilled almost a dozen of times, but for routine documents quality was still good. CM-Super Type 1 font (converted from original Computer Modern with additions related to more scripts) really has hairlines. I configured metafont to increase minimal line width and generated a document with 600dpi raster fonts using latex+dvips+ps2pdf instead of pdflatex. I went to a print shop nearby with hope to find there a printer filled with really black toner. The person there did not get the point why I was not satisfied looking into a test page from my document. It was blurry. Likely the page was scaled to printable area and dithering was applied. I preferred to go to another shop and got a stack of paper printed with proper quality. Either stuff there were a bit more experienced or default printer settings were more reasonable.
So it is not difficult to ruin efforts invested into print quality by inappropriate checkbox. The process is not fool-proof.
