File Size increases when printing (PCL issue?)

[WillShakespeare]

I am at a loss... Here's the sitch:

We installed the latest PCL 6 drivers on everyone's machine in one of our remote offices for their printer there. However, when some pdf files are printed, suddenly it takes forever (sometimes several hours) to print. When you look at the printer applet, the 5MB pdf file shows a size of 80MB, before it prints, and it reaches this over the time at like 4 KB a minute! (Exagerrated for effect)

Anyway, I found that the PCL 5e driver, which they had before, only increases the file to 8MB from 5, which is much more reasonable.

However, one person, who has the PCL 5e, still has the problem on many pdf files.

I don't know what to do! I've tried all sorts of drivers for it, including PS drivers, but this doesn't help.

The way these pdfs are created is by scanning to pdf, so that each page, I guess, is a bitmap, and so a 20 page pdf is 5MB in stead of a few KB.

Might that have something to do with this?

Machines used are XP with SP2, Windows 2003, and Windows 2003 TS.

Thanks in advance,

Will

 

[jthomas666]

We're running into the same problem. A two page PDF, scanned document, file size of ~170k. Not sure what was used to create the PDF, but the PDF version is 1.4.

When we try to print, the filesize of the doc in the print spooler balloons up to ~60MB, and printing the 2 page document takes upwards of 5 minutes.

Any thoughts on how to address this problem?

 

[WillShakespeare]

Still no joy solving, but a workaround I have implemented is installing the PCL 5e drivers on the server, and installing a second PCL 5e printer on the clientside. If they have trouble, they use the pCL 5e driver and it works better... still expands, but instead of ~60MB, it will be ~10MB and print much quicker.

I'll let you know if I find more.

 

[WillShakespeare]

Of course, those users who now had a choice simply use the PCL 5e driver now exclusively, and so the problem has not reared its ugly head again...

Will

 

[WillShakespeare]

As to the person who had the problems even on PCL 5e, it was the specific files. You see, if people use huge settings on scanning to a pdf document, although the pdf correctly interprets it as a small file size, when PCL 6 (and even PCL 5e to a lesser extent) interprets each page as a separate BMP with the original scan settings (say highest quality and 1200dpi instead of 300 or something), and so each page becomes a 2 - 10 MB memory footprint on the spooler sub system, and the printer. And this is what takes time.

If anyone is savvy about such things, there may be a way to stop the interpretation before it hits the PCL driver... but i haven't had the time to look.

Will