Slow Printing on Mac and Best Generic MAC driver

[troyofsunday]

What is the best generic MAC driver to use. We always want our customers to use the correct driver for the machines but we have an issue and using SHARPS driver isn't an option. I have laid out what we have done and why we are looking for a generic driver below.

We have a customer with a MX-4111N that is taking around 12-15 mins to print a large PowerPoint file. The doc is close to 65mb and around 61 pages full color. Even after changing it to PDF the doc is taking the same amount of time. We tried the file on the Windows side and the document only took a few mins to process. Working with there IT we tried printing the file on the following machines, MX-M654N, MX-5111N, MX-5141N. The 654 did the best with the document. This file has been sent to different machines on different networks with similar results. We tried multiple ways of printing the document as well. Submit print job from web page, print from usb, print from external data access (pulled file from our server), and from workstation. Best results were from print job from web page on the 5141.

After calling sharp and they scratched there heads and said they were not sure why it would be doing this we were out of options. In a last ditch effort we ended up trying one of the generic driver options on the MAC. When we used the Generic PCL6 driver on MAC 11.10 and it processed in about a min and was at true machine speed once it hit the machine. The only problem we ended up having was it printed in b/w even though it was told color. With them needing it to be in color and the speed increase we are now searching for a driver that will solve both issues.

[Paulm]

What parameters are you using to set up the printers on the macs? Are you using IP with LPD?

[qbert69]

Is the PDF that is generated "flattened"...or does it have layers?...if it has layers, the machine has to process those into a flattened image before printing!

See how many elements are in your PDF by using File Juicer on the Apple PC:

File Juicer - Extract images from PDF, PowerPoint, Word, Excel and other Files on Mac OS X

I have seen a PDF document fail to print or spool for a looong time due to having too much complexity!....various color spaces, layers, fonts, etc. Simplicity is the KEY to getting a PDF to print! Remember...PDF is a CONTAINER FORMAT!....and can contain MANY elements!!!

Good Luck!