iPad Pro no AA on Notes app printouts

[sjleworthy]

Hi guys

Just printing some Pencil written notes out on my new Brother Airprint enabled laser printer from the new Notes app. All looks smooth and good on the screen, but when printed the AA or smoothness of the writing is not there. it's quite bitty and fragmented almost.

is this an app to printer limitation or a printer fault do you think? only the printer prints super smooth and curved lines from everywhere else as you'd expect

 

[username:]

I would be interested to hear what the issue is if anyone knows.
I don't have a printer right now but might get one at some point.

 

[Krevnik]

Printing on Mac/iOS involves the app producing a PDF representation which is is then printed. If the lines are getting aliased, I suspect that Notes is not rendering the strokes at a high enough resolution in the PDF. I also suspect Notes uses a single large canvas to hold all the stroke data, which means making it high resolution will eat a ton of space/memory. Large bitmaps are problematic as they take a lot longer to print than text, and they also have limits on how big they can be before the printer just starts to choke.

I'm really rusty on printer tech, so I honestly don't really know the details on when a bitmap is "too big" for a modern printer. But back when Bonjour/ZeroConf was new in the early 00s, printers were running on so little RAM (a few MB), Apple had to find ways to strip down Bonjour even more for it to fit on printers (and UPnP was so big, it was basically a non-starter). These days, bitmaps can still be huge, and printers still tend to cheap out as much as possible on the CPU running it.

 

[sjleworthy]

thanks guys. it's not too much of an issue really. but i will continue to look into it.

i havent got a super hi-ressy laser copier, just a lower end monochromic job for business letters and correspondence. so this might also add to the issues.

saying that, photos from my photo app print fairly speedily through, even if not wonderfully crisp.