[OS X TeX] Problem printing TeX-derived PDFs on Mac OS X

[Kevin Van Horn]

I have a terrible time printing any sort of PDF file that was created  
via TeX/LaTeX.  The print quality is quite poor, and when I look at  
the text closely it appears that it is being halftoned!  That is, it  
looks as if the text is being treated as gray (less than completely  
black) and then appropriately converted to a dot pattern to produce  
the gray tone.  I have this problem both with PDFs I produce and with  
academic papers I download from the web.

I do not get this problem with PDFs produced via other tools.  Also,  
when using LyX, printing directly from LyX itself avoids the problem,  
but if I first export to PDF (using pdflatex) and then print the PDF,  
I get the problem.

On a somewhat related note, is there some way of getting better fonts  
for the Mac?  Even when when I avoid the halftone problem by printing  
directly from LyX, the thinnest parts of the letters are still so thin  
as to be nearly invisible.

I have been a TeX/LaTeX user on and off for nearly 25 years now, and I  
never had such problems until after I started working on the Mac.

OS: Mac OS X 10.5.6
Printer: Brother HL-1850
TeX distribution: TeXLive-2007

Any help would be appreciated.

-- Kevin S. Van Horn