Comment 25 for bug 235399

Ok, what I've been doing with my HP Photosmart 8050, even after all the
wonderful discussion and Q and A's from folks lots smarter than me, is this: In
Preferences, I change the "Printing Shortcuts" to General Everyday Printing
(the default is, on mine anyway, is Custom Print Settings. THEN I go to the tab
that says
"Color" and click Print in Greyscale, and I click Use Black Ink Only.

Now, I am SURE that my color cartridge is not going down as quickly as it
was before I even found you folks. Also, probably what I'm doing is not
altogether correct, or maybe too many steps, blah-blah-blah, but so far is works for
me. It's obvious I don't print alot, so it's not a big deal to do it...Can't
get hubby to do it, tho, and he's the one that prints the most!

Good luck,
  Mary

In a message dated 12/22/2008 12:06:01 A.M. Eastern Standard Time,
<email address hidden> writes:

I'm having the same problem as the OP. I'm on Hardy and using an HP
OfficeJet 5610. I went looking for a reason why my color ink was being
drained on black text documents printed in OpenOffice (though I've
confirmed it does the same in Abiword). I've read a lot tonight,
including this thread, and I'm still rather confused as to why the
printer would ever use color to produce black and white, particularly
when there is a full black cartridge. In this case, there wasn't a
single pixel of color in the entire document, which adds to the
confusion. For what ink costs, I'm motivated to find out more!

Could someone help me understand the difference between "Printout Mode"
and the second option which provides a bunch of resolution/color
combinations? Is Printout Mode simply a few main options with all those
other things preset in most often used bundles? Or is there something I
will be missing if I set a quality combination on my own in the second
section? Until now I've just left HPLIP settings on automatic and
assumed that the application would call for what it needed. If I set
this to something specific as has been suggested, like 300dpi, color,
black + color cart, will this cause issues for other programs?

Most of the accounts I have found about this issue involve the HP 5610,
FWIW. Let me know if I can provide any useful information.

--
"Print black" does not use black ink cartridge
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/235399
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of the bug.

Status in HP Linux Imaging and Printing: New
Status in “hplip” source package in Ubuntu: New

Bug description:
Binary package hint: openoffice.org

If I want to save money and print black text with black ink, I have to
select the "greyscale" printout mode. Of course, when I do that, my images also
come out black & white. There are evidently workarounds, or I can run the pages
through twice and hope the alignment is perfect, but I don't think that
should be necessary.

I'm running Kubuntu Hardy (8.04) with linux kernel 2.6.24-17-generic.

The version of OpenOffice.org is 1:2.4.0-3ubuntu6.

My printer is an HP Officejet 5610 All-in-One, which is a USB printer.

I thank you in advance for everything you do.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
Date: Tue May 27 22:04:32 2008
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 8.04
NonfreeKernelModules: ath_hal
Package: openoffice.org-core 1:2.4.0-3ubuntu6
PackageArchitecture: i386
ProcEnviron:
PATH=/usr/lib/openoffice/program:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr
/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: openoffice.org
Uname: Linux 2.6.24-17-generic i686

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