Printing white from the OKI C942 - FULL PAGE IS WHITE

[pdcweb]

I have a super neato commercial printer from OKI, (OKI C942) It prints CMYK and WHITE all on the same pass.
Some people use it to make greeting cars on coloured paper. I use it to make custom decals for model railroad hobbyists.

Sometimes people send me files that were created in Inkscape. I work in CorelDraw. These two don't seem to get along well.

I installed Inkscape to try printing from it. It prints the entire page in white ink. It's not supposed to.

How it should work:

The printer will print white wherever it sees an object in the output.
This results in white ink under CMYK objects and any objects that are "white" in the drawing are also printed  in white ink in the output.
White under the CMYK creates opacity for the CMYK colours alowing them to be seen when applied to a painted model.

In CorelDraw this all works perfectly.

When printing from Inkscape however, it appears Inkscape is outputting an object for the "paper" and thus the printer is printing the entire sheet in white. (as well as the CMYK where expected)

I have tried setting the background of the Inkscape drawing as transparent and I have also turned off the Page Border and Border shadow.
The results remain the same.

Does anybody have any suggestions for omitting the background object when printing on this printer?

- Bill

[brynn]

Welcome to the forum!

First I should probably tell you that Inkscape doesn't support CMYK yet.  So possibly that's part of the problem, if the printer is expecting it?  Not that I really understand much about either printing or cmyk.  But just to let you know.

Inkscape's background is transparent by default.  So if you don't change it, it will be transparent.  There is an option to display the grayscale checkerboard which most graphics programs use to indicate transparecy.  I don't know if the machine might recognize that and respect the transparency?

In any case, Inkscape's printing capabilities are extremely basic.  So much so that we typically suggest saving the file as PDF, and using a PDF viewer to print from, if you need anything more than a simple page print.

Inkscape does have an extension to produce CMYK (in a PDF file, I think).  If I'm not mistaken though, it might or might not work with Windows.  Here's that extension, if you'd like to try it.  https://inkscape.org/~wout/★output-pro  also  https://github.com/wout/Inkscape-OUTPUT-PRO

Given all this info, if you still think Inkscape isn't performing properly, you're welcome to file a bug report:  https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inbox/issues (click the green New Issue button)  (more info about how to make a bug report, if you need it:  https://inkscape.org/contribute/report-bugs/)

[pdcweb]

Thanks for your reply brynn,

Printing CMYK is not the issue, as the colour portions are outputting fine.

I think the issue is that Corel treats the desktop and page as their own distinct layers and they are by default "unprintable" so no objects are sent to the printer defining them. Whereas even though these can be set to transparent in Inkscape, the object is still being sent - leaving inkscape incompatible with this printer.

Printing from PDF works - so we'll go with that. Thanks!