Chromatography Forum

Quick question that no one in my lab can tell me. Is there a way to make the traces on the chemstation reports darker? Now when they print out the lines are a line blue and are so faint I can barely see them. Most the scientists here seem to just trace with a pen and paste into the notebook but it seems like there should be an easier way! I played around with the options in the chemstation report menu but had no luck. Anyone know how I can do this?

Are you using a color printer or black and white?

Gasman

its a color printer, but even when i print in grayscale the line is still incredibly faint.

First, what version of ChemStation and which version of Windows are you using?

What exactly are you doing to get this print-out, like "Print Report" ?

Is there a way to set your computer or printer so it prints in black only?

Have you tried using a black-only laser printer instead of your color printer which gives you blue?

Also, you should be able to go into the Window win.ini file, open that up as Notepad file, find the line DEChrom1=0 0 255 (which details the chromatogram as blue) and change that to DEChrom1=0 0 0 which should make the chromatogram BLACK, and save the change. So when you start up ChemStation the next time chroamtogram should appear black on screen.

If black lines are coming out OK, you could try forcing the trace to be in black instead of blue. To do this proceed as follows

Find the Chemstation.ini file in your Windows directory. I would first make a copy of this file.

Open the file with Notepad.

Find the PCS section relevant to your instrument. If you have only one GC on the ChemStation, this will be [PCS,1]. Look for the entry
DECHROM1, which will probably have an entry like DECHROM1= 0 0 255.

Change the 255 to 0, so that the entry now reads DECHROM1=0 0 0

Save the file

Restart ChemStation. The chromatograms will now be drawn in black instead of blue. This may help your problem.

Gasman

Thanks guys for the help! It worked perfectly!

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