Printing Issue - Spooler File Size Huge

[Llama God]

Hi,

I'm having trouble with printing from the Windows Picture Viewer in WIndows 7. It seems to be creating a massive spool file, 250MB or so, from a 5MB photo.

Do you know of any settings to try to get around this?

Thanks in anticipation,

Chris

[Tonerbomb]

I've seen this many times with Ricoh drivers. Try one of the other drivers for the machine your working with.

[Llama God]

I've tried it with the PCL5 and 6 drivers and they're as bad as each other. I've also tried the latest PCL6 Universal Print driver but this hangs or even crashes the application prior to actually printing the document.

[revenent]

Maybe you could give a try by using another aaplication to send the print job instead.

[Llama God]

This is true, if I send the same photograph from Paint it spools and prints almost immediately.

Now all I need to do is to explain this to 800 school children!

[Mr Spock]

Microsoft where bigger is always better!

[mojorolla]

SYMPTOMS
When you print a document that contains lots of raster data, the size of the Enhanced Metafile (EMF) spool file may become very large. Files such as Adobe .pdf files or Microsoft Word .doc/.docx documents may contain lots of raster data. Adobe .pdf files and Word .doc/.docx documents that contain gradients are even more likely to contain lots of raster data.

CAUSE
This problem occurs because Graphics Device Interface (GDI) does not compress raster data when the GDI processes EMF spool files and generates EMF spool files.

This problem is very prominent with printers that support higher resolutions. The size of the raster data increases by four times if the dots-per-inch (dpi) in the file increases by two times. For example, a .pdf file of 1 megabyte (MB) may generate an EMF spool file of 500 MB. Therefore, you may notice that the printing process decreases in performance.

RESOLUTION
To resolve this problem, bypass EMF spooling. To do this, follow these steps:

Open the properties dialog box for the printer.
Click the Advanced tab.
Click the Print directly to the printer option.

Note This will disable all print processor-based features such as the following features:

N-up
Watermark
Booklet printing
Driver collation
Scale-to-fit


Once EMF spooling is turned off, you can use the Application to perform any N-up printing needed.


microsoft-tech-support.jpg

[Llama God]

SYMPTOMS
When you print a document that contains lots of raster data, the size of the Enhanced Metafile (EMF) spool file may become very large. Files such as Adobe .pdf files or Microsoft Word .doc/.docx documents may contain lots of raster data. Adobe .pdf files and Word .doc/.docx documents that contain gradients are even more likely to contain lots of raster data.

CAUSE
This problem occurs because Graphics Device Interface (GDI) does not compress raster data when the GDI processes EMF spool files and generates EMF spool files.

This problem is very prominent with printers that support higher resolutions. The size of the raster data increases by four times if the dots-per-inch (dpi) in the file increases by two times. For example, a .pdf file of 1 megabyte (MB) may generate an EMF spool file of 500 MB. Therefore, you may notice that the printing process decreases in performance.

RESOLUTION
To resolve this problem, bypass EMF spooling. To do this, follow these steps:

Open the properties dialog box for the printer.
Click the Advanced tab.
Click the Print directly to the printer option.

Note This will disable all print processor-based features such as the following features:

N-up
Watermark
Booklet printing
Driver collation
Scale-to-fit


Once EMF spooling is turned off, you can use the Application to perform any N-up printing needed.


microsoft-tech-support.jpg

Thanks for that, I'll ask the customer to give that a try...when I'm back from holiday in 2 weeks. Until then, as far as work are concerned, I have met with an untimely death.

[madas]

Hi, Llama God what was the out come of this one?

Cheers

madas

[rthonpm]

You could always change the file type association to always open in Paint instead of the Windows Picture Viewer (a terrible piece of software if there ever was one!). If the school has a domain, it could probably be pushed out as a group policy.