[Wylug-discuss] best sig ever

[John Hodrien]

On Fri, 3 Sep 2004, James Holden wrote:

> On Fri, 2004-09-03 at 09:38, Dan Walker wrote:
>> John Hodrien wrote:
>>> On Thu, 2 Sep 2004, Dan Walker wrote:
>>>
>>>> Oh, I'm glad that's not just me. My little Samsung ML4500 has terrible
>>>> trouble when I try to print nasty large graphics, especially directly
>>>> from GIMP for some reason.
>>>
>>> Yup, same here, and this is onto a beefy 128Mb Colour Laserjet...  Print
>>> from
>>> windows to a file, lob that at the linux queue, and it will work 99
>>> times in
>>> 100.  Ah well, we are playing catch-up after all...
>>
>> Actually, I tend to find that printing from GIMP to a file and then
>> either using lpr to print it or using ps2ps to rewrite the postscript
>> before printing works, too. What confuses me is that surely the
>> rasterisation is being done on the PC, and so it shouldn't matter what
>> the content is by the time the printer gets it.

If you're talking about line printers like inkjets then probably.  I don't see
these problems with a deskjet I've got here.  But laser printers take the
whole page, and rasterise it themselves from the postscript.  There's many
different ways to make the same output in postscript...

> Graphics seem to stuff up my laserjet too. It's an old-ish 2100, but
> it's had the RAM beefed up to 20MB. If I throw a file at it that
> contains even a few little low-res images, it takes ages to print. I'm
> quite sure that wouldn't be the case on windows.

2100M with slightly more ram suffers the same problem.  Suffers far less if I
send it PCL rather than PS.

> The printer isn't *that* ancient. For example, I've been looking at
> houses to move to (we've outgrown ours) and if I print a web page with
> maybe 6 or 7 300x200 (ish) pixel images and some text, which results in
> maybe three pages of output, it takes about 5 minutes to process it.
>
> ANyone any ideas?

PCL would be my only suggestion I'm afraid.

jh

--
"A man ceases to be a beginner in any given science and becomes a master in
  that science when he has learned that he is going to be a beginner all his
  life."                                              -- R G Collingwood