Joined: May 31, 2003 Posts: 219 Location: French Alps
Posted: Sat Sep 11, 2004 10:43 am Post subject: Report about printing test
I spent a few hours testing printing with Neo/J, to decide what is the best way: export to PDF then print the file or print directly.
Actually, I make virtual printing by only generating PDF files (Preview button in print dialog for the "print" way).
Short story:
- Graphic (bitmap) intensive files : export to PDF, then print.
- Text files: print directly.
Long story:
I have a file which is a nightmare to print. It's only 7 pages long but includes a lot (23) of high resolution (300dpi) JPEG pictures, weighting 13.3 Mb. I sent this file to Patrick in the past when it was crashing Neo/J. I also used a 19 pages text document with a handful of smaller inbeded pictures and another graphic intensive document.
Results / comment :
- For any document including a lot of bitmap graphics I really advise to use the new "export to PDF command" of OOo-1.1. The generated PDF weight 17Mb and is made reasonably fast. This is using the medium quality setup of the PDF dialog : "export for printing". The "export for screen" quality is unusable, even on screen. I didn't test the "export for press" quality, because I was apprehensive (see below).
- The same document printed to Preview took 25 mn (667Mhz G4) and a huge swap to come out. My system usually runs with 1Go of swap (4 files 64M, 64M, 128M, 256M, 512M). Printing this file did overfow this setting and made a fifth file (512M). I expected this result since it was the same with Neo/J 0.8.
- For text file: the two ways print equally fast. The file generated by "export to PDF" is bigger (2.2Mb vs. 1.5Mb). This is probably due to bad management of included fonts which are too numerous in the file and probably duplicate. The method used by Patrick to print a page mixing graphic and text make such a page slower to display in Preview and heavier in the resulting file. Nevertheless the overall file is smaller.
-Sometimes the "export to PDF" file has some objects which do not display correctly in Preview but do in Acrobat reader 6. Exemple is the grid of an OLE spreadsheet (.sxd) included inside a text file (.sxw).
Thanks for the info Max. I have noticed how much faster/better printing has been with 1.1. With 0.8.x, I had a 15 page document with text, headers and footers, tables, images, and graphs that would get stuck printing (I would cancel before it ever processed all pages, it would get 2 done in 15 minutes on a G5 Dual 2GHz). Now, all pages are processed within 30 seconds, and the document prints fine.
On top of that, all other document (mainly ppt presentations) that I print, now process a couple orders of magnitude faster. I am extremely happy Patrick got the 1.1 code working.
Oh, and if you are wondering why I didn't post the document that would never print bug, it is because I figured Patrick had enough on his hands with moving over to the 1.1 codebase.
Posted: Sun Sep 12, 2004 10:03 am Post subject: Re: Report about printing test
Max,
Max_Barel wrote:
Short story:
- Graphic (bitmap) intensive files : export to PDF, then print.
- Text files: print directly.
I think your assessment is accurate. For some reason, printing high images is very slow using Java's printing APIs whereas OOo's "Save as PDF" code seems to handle images much faster.
Joined: Sep 18, 2003 Posts: 434 Location: London, UK
Posted: Tue Sep 14, 2004 4:37 am Post subject:
FWIW, if you have Panther, for graphics heavy documents it is possible to alter the file size of the outputted .pdf file of the OS X print preview process if you use the ColourSync options - I wrote a how to at the MacNN forums a while ago:
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