Something a Little Different

Immediately upon returning from several days camping in the rain at Glacier National Park I delivered a  batch of pictures to a local gallery for an all-photography show that opens Friday. If you're near Polson, Montana Friday, 13 July, stop in to the Sandpiper Art Gallery on Main Street. The opening reception is from 5:00—7:00. I'm one of four photographers featured in the show. I helped hang the show a couple of days ago. There's a quite a mixture of subjects and styles, making it a very interesting show. The show will remain in the gallery through 17 August.

For my shows I display a very brief biography and "artist's statement" in a small frame. I'd not updated that in a while. Last time I did I printed it with an ancient HP Photosmart printer, one we used only occasionally for business graphics and other letter-size color prints. I recycled that printer a few weeks ago, leaving the 7900 as the only color printer in the house.

This screen capture isn't readable, but you can see there are several
paragraphs of text, a photo, and a signature .gif, all of which look
good on Enhanced Matte.

I created this document with LibreOffice Writer, and included a photo snapped by my bother-in-law in Badlands National Park; it's the same photo used here on my profile page. I'd never printed to the 7900 from Writer, and I'd never printed a file with text on the 7900. Because there's nothing critical about the appearance of the document, I printed with the driver's  color matching option set to "Epson Color Controls", which is called "printer manages color" in Photoshop. I made the print on a letter-size sheet of Epson Enhanced Matte paper (Ultra Premium Presentation Paper).

The only puzzle I encountered was setting the sheet size. Writer has a Page... option under its Format menu. One sets the page size there; my default is 8.5 x 11 inches (letter size). That option does not set the page (sheet) size when printing. I spent several minutes looking for the page size in the printer dialog. To access this with the Mac driver, it's necessary to check the "Scale to fit paper size" checkbox on the Paper Handling tab. This enables the Destination Paper Size drop-down list from which all of the paper sizes one normally finds for the 7900 can be accessed. Mystery solved.

The resulting print is fine. The text quality is quite good, although less crisp than text printed by my HP LaserJet  1200. The photo looks fine, too, more than adequate for this purpose.

  --Jay