Printer Spool Question ??

[qfg]

Does anyone know why an image file originally 300kb or so will expand to over 10MB in the printer spool, and end up taking a long time to print?

 

[c0rv1d43]

What kind of image file is it? I've seen some corrupted files of type WMF cause this symptom when an attempt was made to print them. I'm assuming that the attempt to print is unsuccessful? Which OS are you running? From which application are you trying to print? If this is NT / Win2K / WinXP there should be a corresponding error or errors in the Event Viewer. It might be helpful for us to know those. Also, if you can tell us something of the environment (network or local printer, LAN / standalone system, etc.), that might be helpful.

- Collin

 

[qfg]

they are usually jpg or tiff.
OS is win98
printing from photoshop usually.
the printing is successful.. it is both a local printer and a LAN connection.

 

[c0rv1d43]

In that case (successful printing) I think that you're just seeing normal behavior. The printer is turning an image which can have a compact size for video display purposes into a rather large map in order to print it out. You can set some (most?) printer drivers to use different data types (like EMF and RAW, and sometimes others) for print processing, and that may have some effect upon the size of the spooled data.

Are you concerned about the size of the spooled data primarily because of the time required for printing, or are you concerned about it for some other reason? I'm no expert on print engines, but I suspect that graphics of some particular level of complexity will require a certain amount of time to print on a given printer and that the time requirement will probably not be amenable to tweaking.

- Collin