PDF's take forever on Brother HL-1870

[philote]

We have a network printer as a share on our Win2k server. When someone at a Windows XP workstation prints a pdf document it seems to take forever for it to come out on the printer. It seems like maybe the printer is having to do a lot of processing on the document and either doesn't have enough processing power or memory. Any ideas how I can speed this up? I don't remember this happening before but have noticed it a lot in the past few weeks.

 

[philote]

Oh, and by forever I'm meaning like 20-30 minutes for a job that shows up as 9MB in the print queue.

 

[mcall]

I'd look to printer driver or pdf file. Reason, we had sim prob but with HPs. In one case, was able to resolve prob by updating printer driver. In another case, prob never really resolved. Architect firm using unknow prog to build graphics inserted in pdf file. Prob went away when firm switched to another program to create graphics.

 

[Jomama46]

In the print driver box, try checking "print as image"

Jomama

 

[philote]

Thanks for the advice, but the pdf document I'm looking at can't be printed as an image. I go to print and hit the "advanced" button but the option to print as an image is not selectable.

I did just get a new driver for this printer and from some preliminary tests it seems to have helped. I thought I had downloaded the latest driver a few months ago when we had another problem but I guess I didn't. Also, the driver I was using was the PostScript driver and the one I'm using now is PCL.

Thanks mcall and Jomama.

 

[diogenes10]

I was hesitant to respond on this since I use win98 and local printer; however if printer settings are possible solutions "graphics as raster" and "truetype as bitmaps" are a couple of things that have helped me with pdf and other issues. Also in regard to drivers a) newer is not necessarily better, I've dropped back to pcl5e from the pcl6 that came with my printer, b) sometimes on things like deskjets loading just the driver and not all the spiffy toolkit stuff can help too.