OT: Sl-o-o-o-o-o-w LJ5M

[Huge]

In recent months, it appears that my trusty LJ5M is taking longer and longer to render pages (sometimes as much as 5 - 10 minutes per page), I assume as the complexity of them rises. I'm printing a 37 page document from Libre Office at the moment and I reckon it's going to take about an hour to print.

It's already got the maximum memory in it. Is there anything I can do to speed up printing, and if not, can anyone suggest a worthy, but speedier, replacement?

And does anyone want a LJ5M? Slow but good!

[The Natural Philosopher]

Is it postcript?

worth getting a postcript module for it and sending it postcript instead if its getting that weirded out

[Robin]

I have that with my LJ5 but just try to leave printing until drink distorts my time sense. And it may just be a placebo effect but if I need it on paper quickly it seems a bit faster if I convert to PDF first (on machine with plenty of memory and a middle-aged I7) then print the PDF to paper.

Can you please tell (or remind ) me where you are? Although IIRC I doubt I can justify the cost of driving down your drive :(

[Huge]

I was being slightly facetious, but if I buy a new printer, this one will be superfluous. I live near J14 on the M1.

[Huge]

5Ms are Postscript by default.

I can't check inside to make sure the PS SIMM is in it (or print a test page) until it's finished printing my manual. Which is going to take about as long as it took me to write.

Hang on, I printed a test page this morning. [Rummage, rummage] It's got

22Mb of memory (wow!) and it does have a PS SIMM in it.

I suspect the processor simply isn't up to the job.

[Mike Tomlinson]

En el artículo , Huge escribió:

Try using the PCL driver instead of the PS one.

[GB]

I have a LJ5 (not the M version), and yes it's damn slow printing anything that isn't just text. I've stopped using it.

I now use an LJ2200 that's much faster. Toners are still dead cheap.

[Huge]

Oh, I don't know. It appears that it managed to print the document, put it on my desk and switch itself off.

Or perhaps my wife had something to do with it.

[Bob Eager]

Change LibreOffice to generate PCL if you can. Not sure you can, so in that case filter the output to mao it into PCL.

[Bob Eager]

It's a 5M, so it's PostScript. (the 'M' originally stood for 'Mac' as that was all they knew)

[Theo Markettos]

You don't change LibreOffice, you change your printer driver (Windows, Linux, whatever). A 'generic PCL' driver should do the trick.

I did some tests on my PCL Laserjet 4 and discovered that parallel was marginally faster than ethernet, surprisingly.

Theo

[Bob Eager]

Libreoffice includes all of its own drivers on Linux.

[John Rumm]

You could try different versions of the printer driver... there ought to be a PS and a PCL5 version - you may find the latter faster, especially if there are bitmapped graphics embedded.

I seem to recall my old NEC Silentwriter S62P (similar spec and vintage) was pretty slow on raster graphics.

Another vote for a 2200DN - had one for years, fast and cheap to run. Only problem I had was mine started eating jetdirect interfaces, so I put it on a print server connected to its USB.

[Andy Burns]

Wow, I thought that sort of behaviour went out with WordPerfect (the DOS, UNIX and VMS versions did, presumably not Windows).

[Bob Eager]

IK think it's a portability issue for the actual code.

[Huge]

[28 lines snipped]

No bitmapped graphics. It's all text.

Well, after a couple of hours fiddling about, both with the LO settings and the printer driver, I can choose slow, very slow, extremely slow or astonishingly slow. In fact, I've just typed this whole post while waiting for the first page to come out, using PCL, grey-scale & 8bit "colour". And the first page is relatively simple (being the title page and all).

Subjectively, I suspect this started when I switched from (an elderly) Ubuntu to Mint 17, and hence from Open Office to Libre Office.

Hmmm. [Trogs off to eBay]

[jkn]

That's interesting, I too have a trusty 2200DN and have gone through a few JetDirect boards. The 'cooking in the oven' trick has kept a few of them going, but still...

Can you tell me a bit more about what you do here - is there a USB equivalent to the JetDirect board? I didn't know about that.

Thanks Jon N

[Theo Markettos]

'sfunny, because it prints to all my network printers over CUPS without any setup - in fact I can't find an 'add printer' button anywhere. It sends PDF to CUPS which renders it for whatever printer you have (sending Postscript is also an option).

This is LibreOffice 4.2.7.2 on Ubuntu 14.04.

According to this:

there's a hidden tool called spadmin, but that (/usr/lib/libreoffice/program/spadmin) will only let me 'connect a fax device' or 'connect a PDF converter' - 'add a printer' is greyed out. If I tick 'disable CUPS support' it ungreys it I get a box asking me for a print command line (lpr something) - which is all rather manual and unnecessary for most users.

Theo

[Bob Eager]

Fair enough. I don't use CUPS (spawn of the devil IMHO).