Black Doesn't Print on a Xerox 2045

[catfordprintcentre]

I have recently purchased a 5-user pack of Filemaker 9 having used manual records for the last 25 years.

When I print a record to our production Xerox Colour printer, sometimes it is fine and sometimes a 1-page record blows up to 2 pages with no black print on page 1 and the unwanted page 2 is blank.

The coloured areas of the record (boxes and coloured text) print just fine but even a small company logo has the black missing from the image.

Originally I downloaded a trial version of FM9 and prepared it at home on my MAC but when I took it to work it is hosted on a Windows XP SP2 workstation with 2 clients using this operating system as well.

If I create a PDF I get a 1-page, perfect looking PDF - I then flight check it and all is OK (we are a printing firm so have a sophisticated set of PDF editing tools) but when I print the PDF out to the Xerox I get the same problem.

I don't therefore believe this is a Xerox problem although I don't seem to have a problem printing out to mono machines.

The black text is all R=0 G=0 B=0 but the company logo is CMYK.

Other layouts using data from the same records don't have the CMYK Company Logo and yet still show up the same problem.

Sometimes I notice that even under full admin rights some of the options from the main menu are greyed out which is fixed by refreshing the window but this doesn't cure the printing problem.

We are printing using TCP/IP.

The problem occurs both from printing from a script or from File > Print.

Sometimes if I log in again with full admin rights the problem goes away for a couple of prints and then returns. Sometimes no matter what I do the problem still persists.

The fonts I used when developing my database on the MAC are all Arial/Times/Verdana.

Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Many thanks

Russ Jones

London UK

[Vaughan]

Is the printer running out of black toner?

Do Word documents, for example, print out OK from the same computer?

[catfordprintcentre]

Thank you Vaughan,

There is enough black toner in the machine but thanks for the suggestion.

We actually print about 3k images a day on this machine - mainly complex PDF's for clients (we are a digital and offset litho printing firm).

I have tried changing one field from R=0 G=0 B=0 to R=1 G=2 B=3 and when I get the problem this field now prints just fine.

It therefore appears that there is sometimes an issue with printing a true RGB black from FileMaker down to this particular Xerox machine. (In fact we aren't actually printing directly to the machine but rather to a Creo RIP [some may know it a a contoller]).

If anyone has any experience of a similar problem I would love to hear from them.

If I create a PDF from a record it comes in at about 200k but when I can re-create the problem the PDF comes in at about 2mb.

Also, the problem PDF views just fine but when printed to our Xerox we end up with the black print missing and either 1 or 2 blank pages afterwards.

The database was prepared on my MAC at home and is now hosted on a MAC at work with Windows XP clients. The problem persists regardless of whether it is hosted on a MAC or a PC.

Russ