[cups] Printer pauses a few seconds between each page

[Jörg Thümmler]

Am 13.09.22 um 14:07 schrieb Yvan Masson:
> Hi,
> 
> My printer is an (old) Epson EPL-6200, USB connected. When I print from 
> my Debian laptop a multiple pages document, it pauses a few seconds 
> between each page. It looks like there is one print job per page.
> 
> Another user of this printer, also running Debian and who experiments 
> the same behavior, told me that *once* it printed a 5 pages document all 
> at once, but it was a PDF printed from Evince whereas most of the time 
> we print from LibreOffice.
> 
> I don’t know where I should look, CUPS is still a thing I do not really 
> understand. Do you know/guess the reason of this behavior? Can it be 
> changed?
> 
> You will find attached the PPD I use.
> 
> Thanks,
> Yvan
> 
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Hi Yvan,

i don't think it is something related with cups. Cups would not pause 
between jobs, if it gets the print data fast enough. So even if you're 
true and get 5 jobs for 5 pages there shouldn't be a delay of seconds 
between two pages. (You can check whether there are jobs for each page 
looking at https://localhost:631; if there are, there would be some jobs 
with the same filename.) The only reason for this might be the printer 
itself stops after each job...
The only reason for software splitting pages known to me is, you want to 
print a job with more than one page in more than one copies and you want 
them sorted at printout. In these cases i feeled delays if printing 
pages with lot of graphic content.

I assume this is a data speed and or data size problem; it takes your 
printer too long to interpret the page data (assuming you send 
postscript data) or the printers memory is too small to load more than 
one page at once.

If your printer uses the postscript driver (there is no ppd attached, 
although you wrote) you can give a pcl driver a try:
Don't change your running printer (!) but install another one for this 
usb port and select manually a ljet4 or pcl driver of some "nearly 
listed" epson printer.  If your printer understands that (which i 
assume) the data will be converted to pcl codes which the printer can 
use directly without interpreting ps language, usually this is a lot 
faster. There may be not so much options for the print selectable as for 
the postscript, so it's besides the "never touch a running system" 
thought a good idea to add a new printer and NOT to change the existing...

hth

-- 
cu

jth