[vox-tech] Slow pdf printing

[Alex Mandel]

Henry House wrote:
> På 2006-12-05, skrev Alex Mandel:
>> As of late it seems like my pdf printing is crawling.
>> I don't remember it ever being so slow in the past but maybe it liked 
>> smaller size pdfs.
>>
>> I noticed that sometimes I get and Operand Stack error mid job, these 
>> seem related to the source of those particular pdfs. So I tried pdf2ps, 
>> I get a 70MB ps out of a 1.0MB pdf, that seems to explain a lot but how 
>> do I fix it?
> 
> There are two different PDF-to-PS converters available with similar
> names: ps2pdf, which is Ghostscript, and pstopdf, which is the Xpdf
> libraries. In my experience pstopdf produces smaller postscript that is
> compatible with more printers. Note that many postscript printers
> (including this one as far as I can tell) use a non-Adobe implementation
> of postscript, which in my experience often means that the device is
> finicky about its input (i.e., some valid postscript that Ghostscript
> can render just fine does not print).
> 
>> I also tried printing to a ps from PDF Viewer and that gave me a 1.7MB
>> ps.  But I'm not sure how to print ps 2 per page and duplex?  So I
>> converted ps2pdf on this one(I know seems circular) and this pdf was
>> about the same size(1.7MB), sent it to the printer and 10 minutes
>> later still waiting for pages 5-8 to print(just started).
> 
> You can turn on duplex using psset: 'psset -d' for standard duplex, and
> 'psset -t' for duplex with tumbling. If you are using Foomatic you can
> select this at runtime using a special argument, or you can configure
> the default using foomatic's setup tools.
> 
>> Any ideas? Note: I tested some of these in windows and they fly right
>> out(Same machine, dual boot) But I don't plan to reboot to print 1 pdf
>> a day.
>>
>> Ubuntu 6.06 using Cups with a Brother 5150D
> 
> http://linuxprinting.org/show_printer.cgi?recnum=Brother-HL-5150D says
> that this printer supports numerous drivers, including PS level 3 and
> HPIJS. Which one are you using and have you tried any alternate drivers?
> Their speed may vary.
> 
> Did you use the drivers supplied with cups or did you use Foomatic? (In
> my limited experience with Cups, configuring with foomatic-gui yields
> better results.)
> 
> 
> 

Well, neither. I have foomatic installed and I assume that the Ubuntu 
GUI takes advantage of this as its an "official" component. The driver 
is actually from brother, its the OS 9 ppd file. When I got the printer 
2 years ago this was the only driver.
It turns out I had some sort of ghostscript pre-filter set and removing 
this seems to help and I remember at some point I tweaked with the 
spooling between straight to printer or pre on the computer, but I don't 
see this in the GUI and I must have done it via CLI can anyone remind me 
what I might have done to check and adjust these settings. Likely a 
cupsys command?

Alex