Print PDF direct to printer

Christoph Litauer litauer at uni-koblenz.de
Fri Nov 13 01:01:15 PST 2009


Dear cups users,

very often students complain about the time it takes to print some PDF
documents to our (fast) printers. I tracked that down to the following
situation:
- the documents printed are pdf converted ppt files with transparent
backgrounds or backgrounds with color gradients.
- the students print 2- or 4-up.
- they print from windows clients using the windows cups driver.

Due to the fact that postscript isn't able to represent transparency or
color gradients, the generated postscript code is 40 to 50 times as big
as the pdf source. This postscript code is printed very slowly (up to
several minutes per page).
A workaround would be installing a PCL driver for theses printers. But
the resulting pcl code is nearly as big as the postscript code. When the
document is on the printer it is printed very fast, but the printing
process on the windows client takes lots of time (10-20 sec./page). So
this doesn't seem to be a sufficient solution.

A better solution would be sending the PDF code directly to the printer
as the printer is able to print pdf and does this very fast.

I wonder wether it would be possible to get a (possibly generic) windows
driver that doesn't convert the pdf documents to postscript or pcl.
Instead it should modify the PDF code as to use some printer special
features (input tray, duplex, color vs. greyscale etc.) and send pdf
code to the cups server. Then it would be easy to configure cups to
detect windows generated pdf code and send this code unmodified to the
backend.

-- 
Kind regards
Christoph
________________________________________________________________________
Christoph Litauer                  litauer at uni-koblenz.de
Uni Koblenz, Computing Center,     http://www.uni-koblenz.de/~litauer
Postfach 201602, 56016 Koblenz     Fon: +49 261 287-1311, Fax: -100 1311
PGP-Fingerprint: F39C E314 2650 650D 8092 9514 3A56 FBD8 79E3 27B2




More information about the cups mailing list