Print is not "strong"

libre 4.2.2.1 US English, Writer Windows 8.1 US English

When I print a document from Writer, the text is not dark. In fact it is kind of faint, even if I put bold on. I have gone through all the places I can find to print text as black or to make it darker, but it still does not come out black, rather, a kind of gray or dark gray.

The printer itself, and its ink (i.e. the cartridge is not empty), seem not to be the problem as printing directly from the internet or from someone else’s PDF is nicely and distinctly black text that is black. And printing from MS Word 2002 from my 2002 computer, XP, text on the same printer gives text that is nice and black.

I tried exporting the Writer file as a pdf, and then printing from the pdf, but the pdf just has the same coding or whatever to give the same gray/dark gray as the source Writer document itself.

Is there some special driver I have to engage for libre? Printer: HP 950 all in one, 2002.

What am I missing?

Same problem here. Problem arose for me already in Ubuntu 14.04 and the LibreOffice that was supplied in the package. Now in 15.04 and LO 4.4.2.2 Dutch same problem: black asci text is printed in a kind of grey that has been build from a mixture of colors that are together definitly not black.
When I first export the text as pdf and print this file black is printed as black.
Printing a web page gives the same problem (and pdf solution)
Printer is a Canon iP4300 connected to the home network.

To me it seems that your font color is not really black but a dark grey. A very dark grey might not be visible as such on the screen but in the print on paper and pdf.

I would select a part of the text - maybe the first paragraph - and do Format > Character > Font effect > Font color and select Black and not Automatic. Then print out again.

Should this not be the solution I would reset my user profile following the instructions given here: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/UserProfile

I think you were kind of correct in that the font color might be a dark grey In the course of trying to get “black” I set “print as black” In trying places to do your suggestion, I found the color was a “cyan blue”, which I expect would print as grey/dark grey in a “black only” command. The thing is, when I tried to change the color from the toolbar or from tools/options, the change would not save, and there was no save button. It reverted automatically to automatic on the toolbar and (cont)

(cont) cyan blue on the options. What seems to get a change to “stick” was creating a new custom color with the black attributes and with its own name. Somehow that seems to have stuck. On the appearance page, I selected black, buy my “new” black appears to have been saved. I don’t have the slightest idea why that might have worked but I can’t select and save any of the other preloaded colors.

I haven’t tried to print yet, will post a comment about that when I do. This all seems very odd

The changes I made, made no difference.

Changing the format/character/font effect/font color, made no difference.

Overview of logic:
In Writer the text color is black and the print is not black;
In FireFox a print from black text is not black;
Documents from Writer and FireFox can be exported as pdf;
In pdf viewer Evince the text is black;
From Evince the same pdf can be printed and the printed text is black;
Specific printers from HP and Canon suffer from this problem;
Seems to go wrong in software that both LibreOffice and FireFox use. What could this be?