UPDATE:
Cranked away some more at this tonight. Using the Brother driver uninstaller tool, I removed all brother drivers. Restarted. Upon desktop, it found the printer, loaded a driver and said OK.
I went to Brothers site and found a newer driver for the 1250 model, called "Enhanced Generic PCL driver" Ver. 1.06 Date: 4/18/13. The latest 1240 driver was 2001!!
Updated the Win generic driver with this one. No machine freezing nor weird behavior. So I printed the star chart from FF again....pretty lousy.
Printed again with "Print as image" checked...lousy. No difference.
So I saved the pdf, opened Adobe Reader X, opened the star chart with it and printed from within Reader X...looks great! Nice deep blacks...no holey fonts.
Then I opened up FoxIt and printed the chart from within it...looks far better than when it was printed from within FF, but not near as solid as Reader X.
Next, I went to Bing Maps, zoomed in on a street level section, clicked print...awful..[censored] near useless.
So I've learned there IS a difference when printing pdf's on this old Brother HL-1240 between Reader X and Foxit. I need to save any pdf's I want to print, then print them outside of FF.
But I'm still stumped why street maps look so lousy. Is my printer just too old for whatever is being used for these maps? Somethings still FUBAR.
The 1240 looks great for text docs I write, but LOUSY for bing & google maps...just lousy.
Suggestions? Ideas? Comments? I really want to understand what's going on here.
