Our office recently changed from an HP Laserjet to a Konica C280 printer (both used a PCL driver). I noticed a problem with the printout of the bNames layer on the Konica printer that I haven't seen with the HP. I have a 4-layer board with components on the bottom layer. So when the bottom components (and names) are viewed in Eagle, they are mirrored (as expected) to place them on the bottom side. If I turn on just the bNames and bPlace layers, and print that, the bottom component names are flipped on a horizontal axis when compared to what I see on the screen in Eagle. I attached two jpg's. One is a screen shot showing a few components from the board bottom as viewed in Eagle PCB (this looks correct). The second jpg is a scanned image of the printout I get when printing from Eagle. I just do a print with none of the (Eagle) print options checked, full size, scale factor 1.
Observations: This didn't happen with the HP printer. The tNames layer prints normally - nothing gets flipped. There appears to be nothing in the rest of the layout that is printed wrong. If I change to a vector font, then bNames prints normally (no flipped names). The flipped names occur on the entire bNames layer. I also tried the proportional font and that gets flipped too when printing. It doesn't seem to matter if other layers are on or off, the bNames is always flipped. If I print to a PDF (with proportional font on the board), then the image in the PDF is correct (and prints correctly).
Normally one would quickly conclude that it is a printer driver problem since the HP doesn't exhibit this problem, however I didn't want to jump to this conclusion because I've seen print abnormalities between different printers that weren't due to the printers. I don't know enough about the print drivers or Eagle print output process to draw any conclusion so I wanted to see what the experts think. There is obviously a bug somewhere in the print chain - I don't want to band-aid it by changing all the fonts to vector or always creating a PDF as an intermediate step.
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