Printing from Microsoft PowerPoint to HP monochrome devices

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Summary
HP printer drivers for monochrome devices report as color to improve print quality

Introduction

When printing from Microsoft PowerPoint to a monochrome device, users may notice that the Color/Grayscale setting defaults to color (see image). Users may expect this setting to change to grayscale when a monochrome printer is selected.

print_mono.png

Background

PowerPoint does the conversion to grayscale when the grayscale setting is selected. As a part of this conversion, the slide backgrounds are removed and white text is converted to black. In order to provide a more accurate printed output, the HP printer drivers for monochrome devices detect when a print job is coming from PowerPoint, and tell the application to use the color option.

By specifying the color option, the full color information is sent to the driver which converts the color information to grayscale. The end result is that backgrounds print and white text is printed correctly. The resulting spool file is larger with the background information than it would be without it, but the end result is a more accurate printout.

Additional information

Who wish to use grayscale can manually select this option from the PowerPoint File/Print dialog.
In this case, PowerPoint will convert the print job to grayscale. In most cases the slide backgrounds are not printed, and white text is converted to black.