roland xc 540 printing problems

[arizonadesignsinc]

hi, my name is justin
i'm new to this site, was told to try by a coworker. currently i'm running the roland xc 540. i'm having problems printing letters on my printers. all my blocky letters like a capital "L" some out perfect to the edge, but if you try and print a letter like an "S" the edges are sloppy and pixelated.

if any1 could help i would really appreciate it

 

[Solventinkjet]

Welcome to Signs101!

It sounds like you are printing bitmap images. Since pixels are made up of right angles, any straight up and down and left to right object will look fine. When a curve gets placed into the mix it makes a stair step pattern because there are no curved pixels. If you have to print bitmap text for some reason, try using the anti-aliasing function in your image editing software. Anti-aliasing fills in the space between pixels on curves with an average color between the 2 pixels so that the pattern is less apparent. It is not perfect but it does look better. If you want perfect crisp text, always use vector format when creating the file.

 

[arizonadesignsinc]

so are you saying my problem is i'm printing from a jpg instead of say, an eps?

 

[Solventinkjet]

Kind of. An EPS could still have bitmap data like a JPG in it along with vector. To use vector format fonts you have to use a program like Illustrator or Corel etc. Just opening a JPG in EPS format does not make it vector. Vector and bitmap are not file types but are methods of creating graphics. Vector uses a point based system that mathematically creates lines and curves. Bitmaps use pixels. Vectors can be enlarged to infinity and keep the quality because it just makes the numbers bigger. Bitmap you can't because it just makes the pixels larger which means the bigger you go the more apparent the pixels are. The higher resolution the better but it can still be hard to get nice curves out of a bitmap file which is why people will use high res images in combination with Vector text and logos etc. to make one nice looking file.