Recently I noticed that documents I printed were looking rather green in the places where I'd expect them to be black. This surprised me somewhat, since my inkjet printer has separate black and colour cartridges.
Further investigation has shown that the printer will print with either or both cartridges: if you elect not to use the black cartridge then it will compose black out of the other colours. That's a reasonable feature. Linux/Cups/Gnome/Foomatic/Ubuntu/whatever-it-is-controlling-my-printing can be made can specify either method: black ink or composite black. It's good that they have this support. What's hateful is that the default is to use colour ink for printing black output! What's doubly hateful is that the way the default is displayed doesn't even make it apparent that this is the choice!! I've been needlessly wasting colour ink for months! More specifically, the 'System' > 'Administration' menu has a 'Printing' entry[*1]. This brings up 'Printer configuration', which subdivides the config for my printer into hatefully non-intuitive categories like 'Settings' and 'Printer Options'. An exhaustive search shows that 'Printer Options' is what I want. This has subsections, the first of which is 'General'. After paper size the other option is 'Printout Mode', which is currently set to 'Normal (Color cartridge)'. Yes, that indicates it'll be using the colour cartridge (not withstanding its hateful use of USA spelling, despite my having told it use to UK spelling, which it succeeds in doing elsewhere), but it doesn't indicate that it will _only_ be using the colour cartridge, even for black. And the only other 'Normal' option is 'Normal Grayscale (Black cartridge)', which clearly I don't want. (Or if specifying greyscale is how one gets sane colour printing, that's so hate-ridden it trumps everything else in this mail.) The other options are colour and greyscale version of draft and high quality, plus one for printing on photo paper. So I leave it at the default of 'Normal (Color cartridge)'. The next subsection, right below the 'Printout Mode' option, is 'Printout Mode'. Yes, there's an entire subsection with the same name as the final option in the immediately preceding subsection -- hateful! Well, I say "entire subsection", but actually it only contains one option, which just adds to the hatefulness. That option is 'Resolution, Quality, Ink Type, Media Type', which defaults to 'Controlled by "Printout Mode"'. No, really -- there are two options for the same thing, and among the choices is determining which option actually has effect! Compared to having a single option, with all the choices in it, this is such hateful UI design that I cannot think of a single reason justifying it. Anyway, the non-default choices in the second option include separate entries for each of: * 300 dpi, Color, Color Cartr. * 300 dpi, Color, Black + Color Cartr. which is fairly explicit, so I chose the second and black printing now uses black ink. But how on earth was I supposed to tell that the default of 'Controlled by "Printout Mode"' meant to stupidly use up my colour ink trying to print black? Really? And of course I, hatefully, have to scan the entire second list to see what other DPI entries are available to be able to make an educated guess that 300 DPI corresponds to the 'normal' which I've been used to. In making printing work at all, somebody's had to get some hard things right (and apparently succeeded). It amazes me that they come up with a UI so obviously flawed as this. [*1] Actually, it has two identical[*2] 'Printing' entries, which is hateful in itself. I'm presuming this is the result of upgrading through many Ubuntu releases over the years: a new thingy was introduced, and the old one no longer gets installed by default, but if you upgrade it's still lying around from before. The one I'm not using displays a folder-like view of icons for printers and adding a new one. [*2] Until the most recent upgrade the two entries had different icons. Now even those are the same. Smylers
