On a seasonal note (literally), I received a Christmas letter from my cousin as a pdf file. This was three pages long and included a lot of photographs. However, I could not get it to print. I tried the usual staff..
I then tried printing it as an image and this worked fine (as does my other printing). What is going on?
Merry Christmas to everyone
There are loads of ways to encapsulate images in a PDF file, and it may be the method used was one of the less orthodox ones. You can also protect PDF files against printing, but I would have expected it to say that if that's what the issue was.
Andrew
My cousin holds the copyright. Maybe he is looking for a royalty payment :-)
Not all PDF capable programs are created equal when it comes to printing. The ones embedded in modern web browsers and email programs are often a bit less capable than the standalone applications like Adobe reader or Foxit reader.
So the first thing I would try, it to save the attachment to a file, and then open in another PDF program and try printing from there.
Screenshot of the settings.
[Picture]Inkjets can "stop the sheet of paper and buffer". That means they don't need quite as much RAM, if the manufacturer is a stingy bastard.
Lasers try to print the entire sheet in one go of it. And that requires RAM. The image is formed on a photo-active surface and transferred to the paper via thermal fusion. With lots of gubbins rotating and such.
The question I have about this stuff, is when will they stop short-sheeting the equipment and just give us stuff that works ?
The very first laser printer at work, "it just worked"!!! Shocker. Why was that ? Well, the printer was dumb as a post, and had a "video interface" like a TV set. Whatever image was sent on the video interface, got printed. No scaling. No halftoning. The computer did *all* the prep. The printer had no RAM at all. No opportunity for short-sheeting the customer! hah!
Paul
I was printing using Foxit.
ie, rather than try to print the email attachment, open it and re-save it? I'll know next time, thanks.
Just save it directly from the email, rather than opening it and then saving it.
Sometimes you might even find counter unintuitive steps can work like printing the PDF to the PDF printer driver, then opening that, and print that to the printer.
You can still hold the copyright but allow printing though. It would seem daft to not allow the document to be copied when its only been sent to you.In some cases the font size can be so small as to be unreadable if you only have a phone, and in such cases you need to extract the text for goodness sake. Brian
He has probably put it all in as images. This is the Bain of my life as a blind person. The reader software will show the picture, but when I try to navigate it of course there is no text actually in it. This same issue ten often has knock on effects when you want to print it with various effects like the ink and paper are the same colour, words run off the edge and all sorts of silliness.
People need, to my mind to make their pdfs with a program that tags the text areas and then the printing or for viewing software can tweak it to be able to be read by screenreaders and to be printed when it might otherwise simply not fit and quite rightly refuse to print it using anything but the print as graphics picture. My feeling is that the makers of any software making a pDF need to have a wizard that allowed the person making it to make intelligent choices. What may well fork on your machine might end up a mess on somebody elses with different pdf reading software. Brian
Surely you have access to OCR software.
Kindly elaborate. Otherwise it's hopeless.
When I clicked the 'Print' function, a 'buffering' symbol appeared on the monitor. After about 1 minute or so, the bar had only reached
33%. Eventually it reached 100% but nothing emerged from the printer. When I checked the print queue, I found the relevant files within. I unplugged the printer cable and plugged in in again in case 'plug and play' would solve the problem, but it did not. When I tried the 'image only' printing option, the page printed without difficulty.This is a laser printer - HP LaserJet P1102w. PDF version is 1.7, File size is 1,100 KB. The file contains a lot of colour images as well as the usual text relating to family events during 2022.
Pages 3 and 4 here, explain HP printer types. while this is a sales sheet for colour printers, it does make passing reference to the two types of HP printers.
The second type is PDL (Printer Description Language) based. The printer knows PCL5, PCL6, PostScript. These are vector languages, where you can send a dozen bytes and it "draws a line" on the sheet. Vector allows lower bandwidth usage in getting to the printer. The buffer RAM is larger (and offers DIMM expansion options), because the (faster) printer processor converts vectors into pixels (printer cpu compute effort). This includes downsampling high-res images so they match the printer pixel density.
The advantage of the PDL option, is it buffers up entire pages, and it will only "emit" a sheet, when all pixels are known. It's a "guarantee of delivery" method. The drum won't start rotating, unless the page is ready to print, in printer DIMM RAM.
The host-based printing method, uses a tiny buffer, and it relies on the PC feeding it (in real time!), being able to serve the info at the (steady) rate required. The host-based printer is cheaper to make. There's not even a DIMM slot for a memory upgrade, because the buffer is sized for a small queue of pixels prepared by the host processor. As long as the "PC can squirt at drum-rotation speed", the print comes out of the printer intact, with no damage.
While you would think in this case, there's something wrong with the Windows printer driver preparing the pixels, we cannot be sure unless an error code is thrown that can be used by the computer operator, to "figure it out" :-) Totally silent failures, leave no evidence of which part (the Windows PC, or the dumbass printer) is at fault.
I don't know why the Windows Print Driver is fouling this up, but it's the most likely defect, in host-based printing. A program like Adobe, could be doing the print job, transfers with GDI or something to the Windows printer driver, the Windows print driver to printer with "bulk pixels". I like to find printer stack diagrams, to verify details like that.
Printing the errant document from Linux, using CUPS or something, would be an interesting experiment to see if the doc prints better that way. But it's a lot of work getting printing to work in Linux, so this would hardly be "fun".
Paul
Thanks. I'll have a look at this, though it does not appear to be relevant to the 1100 series and it relates to colour printers when mine is monochrome.
Your laser printer, according to the specs I could find, has 8MB of RAM. It has a tendency to show, on its information display, that it has "1MB of RAM free".
This allows me to classify the device, in a similar way to the table I provided. Your device is a "host-based printer" and the RAM is not expandable. There will be no DIMM slot in there.
Knowing that it is a "host-based printer", means the problem is somewhere in the Windows PC, not the printer.
Paul
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