Re: My Document is Too Big to Print! Need Suggestions for Printer, Please

[Tim Altom <taltom -at- SIMPLYWRITTEN -dot- COM>]

Linda, a couple of things come to mind. First, are you printing right out of
Word, or are you spooling? And if you're spooling, are you sending the file
to a print spooler, directly to the printer's internal spooler, or are you
spooling locally? If you're not spooling at all (and some people don't know
that they're not), then Word can easily louse up the printing job. I suspect
that's the case if Word shows you every page it's sending to the printer.
Don't trust Word for this job; pass the responsibility off to a spooler of
some kind. And if Word is doing its own spooling, the RAM in the printer
won't make any difference. Neither will your machine's RAM or hard disk
space. Word's printer control is just funky.

Second, are you printing in PCL, HP's native language, or are you printing
PostScript? PostScript printing is rife with little problems, but PCL has
oddities of its own. A 6 Meg file can easily balloon when it's sent to a
printer, because the printer language coming out of the driver is textual
and it can be longgg.

Color printers are usually much slower than older black-and-white ones, and
fast color printers are horribly expensive even today. The only feasible
option is to acquire your own and then make sure you're spooling to it, and
that it has tons of RAM in its spooler.

Another possible way to tackle this problem is to print your documents to
Acrobat, then use Reader or Exchange to print. The files are smaller, more
easily distributed, and in my experience far less prone to printer problems.

But I'd advise checking the spooler first. See if you can arrange for
something, anything, off of your machine to take that print file. Failing
that, make sure you're spooling in the background and not printing from Word
in real time.

Tim Altom
Simply Written, Inc.
317.899.5882
http://www.simplywritten.com
Creators of the Clustar Method for task-based documentation






>I have a Word 97 document that is 250 pages long and growing daily.  It has
>about 150 screen shots (optimized; each is about 110K), one gif, and about
>a dozen Visio graphics.  It's 5.83MB today.
>
>I have a Pentium II machine with MMX technology, 6.1GB drive, 128 MB RAM.
>This is a high-end machine, fully upgraded.
>
>When I try to send my document to our LaserJet 5M, the Word dialog shows
>that it's sending pages to the printer; at about 81 pages everything
>freezes and I have to reboot.  If I try it again, with only Word running,
>the same thing happens.  I can only print if I send batches of 25 pages at
>a time to the printer.
>
>Since the document has lots of graphics, I get a lot of requests for color
>versions, but if I send it to the color printer, I have to send it in small
>batches, too, and it takes 5 hours to print if no one jumps in ahead of me,
>and the only way I can do it is to send my little batches just before I
>leave for the day and hope that nobody clears the printer queue before I
>come back again in the morning.
>
>Needless to say, neither of these scenarios is acceptable and I have more
>important things to do than tend a printer.  So, we got a quote from the
>local Kinko's/Office Max which came back at $2700 for 20 copies.  This is
>also unacceptable.  I figure that, for $2700, we might as well invest in a
>high-speed color printer for ourselves.
>
>So, I'm wondering:  does anybody have a high-speed color printer that they
>are happy with, that can handle paper docs as well as transparencies with
>good quality and fast?
>
>P.S.  The first thing I explored was more memory for the printers, but
>found out that the color printer already has 32MB, which should be enough
>for a 6MB document, shouldn't it?!
>
>
>
>==========================
>Linda Castellani
>Technical Writer
>GRIC Communications, Inc.
>1421 McCarthy Blvd.
>Milpitas, CA   95035
>
>408.965.1169
>408.955.1968 - fax
>
>linda -at- gric -dot- com
><http://www.gric.com>
>
>
>From ??? -at- ??? Sun Jan 00 00:00:00 0000==
>
>


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