[cups.general] printer performace / ppt documents

[Paul Ortman]

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Christoph Litauer wrote:
> Several students are printing PowerPointDocuments that take loooong time
> to print (about 3-5 minutes/page). The reason is that these
> presentations contain transparent background on the master or contain
> transparent images (logos etc.). The generated postscript code seems to
> be very ugly so that the printer needs lots of cpu time to render the image.

We're definitely seeing the same thing here.  The lab printer that is
just outside my office door is an HP 4250, which is a pretty nice/new
small business b/w printer in my estimation.  However there are times
when the students in the lab next to me stack up jobs in the queue b/c
of slow to print PPT files.  I suspected it had something to do with
nasty PS from the images in the file, but looking through the archives
showed me this message which seems to confirm that theory.

Currently we're using the PS ppd drivers and CUPS 1.1.23 w/ the Pykota
print accounting software.  I like most every aspect of this setup
except these occasionally super-slow PPT printouts.

Has anyone found certain things that seem to speed things up?  The
printer in question has ~64MB of memory in it, is that the limiting
factor in the PS rendering time?  Is adding RAM the best way to improve
performance on these HP printers?

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Paul Ortman

PGP Key: 55602C81
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