Corrupted tiffs?

[beornica]

Alright -
I recently did a total reinstall on my mac - I upgraded to OS 10.4.8 and re-installed Indesign Creative Suite 2 Premium and all my other stuff I had on there previously, minus pagemaker and quark.
Now, when I go to use tiff files (all stored in my external harddrive, so I didn't do any transferring or moving around with them) they look great on screen, but for some reason, they'll print out JUST awful. They're not new files, either, they're all ones I've used before. A couple of them have been simple enough where I've just vectorized them in illustrator, which was fine in a snap, but there must be some allowance or preference I can change so they won't be awful. And yes, they're all linked properly. Has this happened to anyone before, and if so, what can I do about it?
Thanks in advance for any help. I'm baffled, our company technician is baffled, and until this is fixed I'll be vectorizing a LOT of previously perfectly good files....

[jimking]

They are placed tiffs in Indesign? Try converting a tiff to a eps and see what happens. Also, what are you printing to? Do you have the proper drivers loaded for your printer. Also, trash your Indy Prefs and run Permissions.

[Broacher]

Hmm. It sounds like a TIFF optimization switch in the printer output problem to me. It's a switch in all layout apps (including PageMaker) and in ID it's under Print/Graphics/Send Data. Try setting this to 'ALL' if it's set to the default of 'Optimized Subsampling' and reprint.

If that fixes it, there's something wrong with the way your system is describing your printer. Most likely, a missing PPD file.

Let me know what happens.

[beornica]

It turns out that it IS a missing PPD problem. (changing the tiff to an eps worked too, jimking) My previous printer menus are gone now and I just figured I could live without them, but I can see now I'll have to have them set up again. Silly me and my antithesis of a technician's mind...
I didn't think my PPD's could affect the output of files that were perfectly fine in my computer... phhht... news to me!
Anyway, much gratitude to both of you. I really appreciate your prompt responses!