[texhax] microtype: bad printing

[Arno Trautmann]

Hi all,

short version: Can a scaled font make trouble when printed in a copy shop?

Long version: A fellow PhD just had his thesis printed, which he 
produced with pdfLaTeX using microtype. When he had the final pages in 
his hands, he found that some lines of text where kind of bold, but only 
on pages that contained color and not equally over the whole page, not 
even reproduceable over the several print-outs. (It got worse for the 
later prints, which is why he did not immediatly see it on the test print.)
The lines looked like some kind of poor man's bold, i.e. the whole line 
seems to be shifted for each color. (Since it was a color page, the 
printer appareantly did not take just black, but combined the colors to 
get black). Since this happened only to a few lines per paragraph, I 
suggested that it might be connected to microtype and the printer not 
being able to handle the scaled fonts. The printer also said that this 
never happened with MS Word, but happend with LaTeX more often.
Upon a second try, the printer set the driver to some "CAD" setting, 
then everything was fine.

Does anyone of you have any clue what's going on and most importantly 
how to avoid these troubles? What could I tell the printer to get it 
right the first time?

Best,
Arno