When you provide printing equipment for your company, you must also take care of its repair needs. You should be able to pinpoint your issue before calling a professional so that you can avoid making a time-consuming diagnostic service call. Look beyond your hardware for the settings that can cause these results if the output tray contains unexpected mirror images of the documents you can see on your monitor.
Demystifying Output
Rarely do printer issues cause printed output to seem inverted, such as from light to dark or left to right. The improper consumables bays for ink or toner in a color printer would result in color changes that didn’t resemble simple picture inversion and couldn’t alter the vertical or horizontal appearance of your files. These not so mysterious symptoms almost always point to the decisions you made when printing the file, decisions that reflect the capabilities and options in the software you used, rather than a hardware issue.
Inverted Colors
The option to print files in negative format is available in a lot of PDF readers and graphical software. Along the colour spectrum, white turns into black, yellow turns into blue, and so on. You might be producing these intermediate types of output directly from your image-editing, illustration, or page-layout software when printed output serves as the foundation for setting up a printing press or silk screening process. In these situations, you print each color separately to create a printing plate that shows the positive version of the image, inverting each color to indicate the separations for press use. By accident, the inversion features of your software produce color mirroring output.
Positional Mirroring
Whether you call it flipping, flopping, or reflecting, many applications, especially specialized graphics software, have the capability of printing a mirror image of a file at printing time. By using these parameters, you can create mirrored output without changing the text or visuals in the original file. Despite the fact that these abilities are crucial for creating the emulsion-side-down negatives needed to prepare printing plates, they might not be very useful to you if you don’t work in prepress. Your application should provide tools and methods for modifying your original or producing an altered copy if you need to change your designs yourself.
Considerations
Some programmes store the printing configuration together with the document when you save it. You can determine that changing print parameters affected a file if you save it, change the print settings, start to shut the document, and the application prompts you to save changes. Before sending your files to the printer, review your settings, and avoid saving temporary print parameters to prevent scenarios where you print your work and discover the outcome represents an output state you didn’t desire.
