See TIPS ON COLOR PRINTING FROM OCAD for some ideas on printing from OCAD.

OCAD FILES FOR DOWNLOADING:
1.  test_colors1.ocd   contains a test color pattern. Use for testing your color printer.
2.  test_colours2.ocd   contains a test color pattern. Use for testing your color printer.
3.  test_colours3.ocd   contains a test color pattern. Use for testing you color printer.
4.  EpsonSytlusColor600.ocd   are the suggested colors to use with this printer.
5.  EpsonSytlusColor800.ocd   are the suggested colors to use with this printer.

If you would like to contribute to this list, proceed as follows:
1. Delete all map information.
2. Delete all but one text symbol from the symbol table.
3. Type in the name of your club and/or your name at coordinates (0,0) and any contact information you want the public to have and the name of printer(s) that you know it works with.  Example,

Houston Orienteering Club
http://hoc.us.orienteering.org
hoc@hoc.us.orienteering.org
Colors for Epson Stylus Color 800

The colors on the screen are not the colors printed!  To get acceptable colors one has to experiment.  All printers are different.  The color definitions that work for me probably will not work for you.  By using one of the test OCAD files (a color chart with several blues, yellows, browns, and greens) you can a rough idea of what to start with, but experimentation is still required.  It's not something that you can do a few days before the meet.  The testing has to be done many weeks before the meet.

Our club, HOC, prints the original on a desktop printer and then takes the original to the copy shop.  The cost is 0.50 USD per copy doing it that way.  We can give the printer an EPS file, and the print shop will charge us 3.00 USD per copy.  They are made on the same hardware as photocopy using a computer tie-in called a "Fiery".  The quality is almost imperceptibly better.  If your print shop charges the same for Fierys as for photo copying, go the EPS/Fiery route.

The reason that the typical desktop printer can't produce all the colors that we want is because of resolution.   If all we wanted were to print a black line on a page, 300 dpi (118 dots per cm.) would be acceptable.  When we want to print a brown line, things are a lot more complicated.

The typical desktop printer has 4 ink colors, cyan, magenta, yellow, and black (CMYK).  To print any of these 4 colors, 300 dpi is generally acceptable.   If we only have 4 ink colors, how are all those other colors printed we see coming out of the machine?  It so happens that if you print a magenta dot on top of yellow dot (or visa-versa), you get a red dot.  If you print a cyan dot on top of yellow dot, you get green.  If you print a cyan and magenta dot, you get blue.   Cyan, magenta, and yellow on top of each other will print black, but it's much easier (cheaper/faster) to use the black cartridge.  If you don't print any dots, you get white.  This gives the ability to print 8 colors: white, black, cyan, magenta, yellow, red, blue, and green.  Note: brown is not one of the colors.

If we can print only 8 colors, how do the printers print those beautiful photographs?  They use a process called "dithering".  If you could print a portion of a dot, the problem would be solved, but it's a whole dot or nothing.  If we want to print a brown color patch, we can put down a red dot (magenta and yellow) and next to it a black dot and so forth.  If we now stand back from it, our eye will "mix" them and we see a dark brown color.  If we want a light brown patch, we put down two red dots for every black one - lighter still - more red dots and less black dots.  This is dithering, and it works well with a patch of color, but for lines, resolution is key.   The IOF standard calls for 0.125 mm line thickness for a contour.  At 300 dots per inch that is 1.5 dots!  If we use a printer capable of printing at 1440 dpi, we get 7 dots per line width and a better shot at the shade of brown we want.  Never the less, no matter what the resolution of your printer,
colors change by "jumps" unlike the screen colors.  In other words changing from 30% to 49% magenta may have no effect, but a change from 49% to 50% will have an effect.

When dithering one can put down the dots in a regular pattern, this can result in a rather unpleasant effect of some lines being one color and the same type lines at a different location being another color.  With patches of color (slow run, walk, fight) the eye can also detect when a  regular pattern is used.  A random pattern called "diffused" (other types of dithering are dispersed, clustered, serpentine, and error diffused) will break up this pattern.  Diffused is recommended, but it also has problems especially with lower resolution printers.  It is also recommended that you turn off "screen matching" (also called "true colors") when printing your maps.

Why don't all the maps printed on printers with the same resolution look the same?  This is because the manufacture's inks very from company to company.  Epson's cyan may not be Cannon's cyan.

Finally, it does no good to print using a 1440 dpi printer, if the paper you are using is only good for 300 dpi inch.  The cheaper paper will "bleed", and it is not as white as the more expensive paper.  Bleeding is generally not bad for patches of colors  (slow run, walk, fight), but it is harmful to resolution.  Poor resolution imply poor reproduction of lines and small symbols.