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no prints from 800ps


SJE

Question

Our office runs VW12.5.1 on MAC Power PCs and print to an HP designjet 24" 800ps printer. The 800ps driver installed is version 2.0 of 4/03/05.

With VW Quartz Imaging turned ON then we cannot print direct from VW12.5 to the 800ps. Either the spool and print time is incredibly long or there is no print at all.

With Quartz Imaging OFF we can print direct from VW12.5 to the 800ps.

We want to print with QI ON.

If we export drawings as pdf using Adobe driver, then we can print from Acrobat fine BUT this is long hand and not desirable.

The problem seems to be with VW's compatibility with the HP driver.

The HP website has a download of a new driver version 4.1 of 31 July 2006.

When we run the installer for this driver then no new PPDs are installed

Is there a newer version of the driver for os x that we can install?

What are our options?

Thank you

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I would contact HP directly about the print driver. They are going to know more than we are about that subject.

As for the printing problem - how large are the VW files?

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I can confirm what SJE is saying. We have this same printer, an a mix of PPC and Intel Macs and I was thinking it was limited to the Intel machines, but we definitely are seeing hugely long print times when printing out of VW with Quartz on. We use the Export PDF function instead of printing to PDF using Adobe's driver, this is much faster, and print the same document using Acrobat and it comes out at normal print speed.

ion

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That may be true Katie, but what SJE is saying and myself as well is that it is dramatically different, like 6 minutes to print an exported pdf D sized sheet, versus waiting an hour and a forty minutes before cancelling the print to go the pdf route, for the same file of 768 kb. the same file printed with quartz on to our oc? goes in 30 seconds or so. We also see the dramatic wait with our HP 5000 and HP 4050, but not with our Ricoh/Savin copier/printer. There seems to be a specific issue with the HP Drivers and Quartz

all the best,

ion

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Katie

VW 12.5.1 file size 8.2MB.

i agree with all ION says and especially "There seems to be a specific issue with the HP Drivers and Quartz" .

But is this problem limited only to postscript (HP only) plotters?

or Is there a Quartz / postscript incompatibility?

sje

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both our Oc? and our Ricoh printer use Postscript 3 drivers. So yes it seems that it is HP Postscript.

That is a great thought Islandmon, I will send some test prints in the morning after clearing the logs to see if there is anything else going on.

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Here are some thoughts having further tested and discussed with our Tech:

A drawing of small file size and limited complexity and with the QI pref ON then the postscript printer works fine (HP800ps).

But with a larger and more complex file size then the HP can't cope.

Looking further in to possible reasoins why:

If Quartz Imaging is ON, then the computer does the rastering of the image and sends the printer a HUGE pre-built bitmap image rather than a set of instructions on how to print the file.

And with QI checked OFF the printer does the rastering.

But the trouble seems to be that a bitmap sent to the ps printer requires a LOT of information (QI turned ON). The file still gets sent as a bitmap inside a postscript document because the printer only accepts postscript as per its driver.

So possibly the printer probably doesn't have enough memory to store all those bits and the printer can't cope with the file size.

HOWEVER:

PDF files created from the same drawing page,one with QI turned ON and the other with QI OFF are of approximately equal size. 836Kb vs 800Kb cretaed from original drawing file size of 8.5Mb. PDFs were creted by native Mac pdf print option.

How does this compare with what others have found??

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Quartz uses Core Foundation GPU processors when the possible... CPU if not.

HP often uses HPGL emulator for postscript.

OSX CUPS uses various rasterizers ( many come pre-installed & via GIMP & Gutenprint , see ' /Library/Printers ' and /Library/Printers/PPDs/Contents/Resources/en.lproj/HP Designjet 800 PS3 ) depending on device and then the specific PPD for pagination etc . Via safari . http://127.0.0.1:631/

Printer memory works from a temp print spool file and paginates as required.

Console >cups will tell if any issues with rasterizer, spool or PPD.

Recall that CUPS requires an authentication via root.

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Ok I did a quick test on file sizes. All of the pdfs or postscript files were created from the vectorworks file. the key is:

osxpdf = print dialog, choose the save as pdf option

vwpdf = Export>Export PDF from within VW

adobepdf = Print Dialog using Adobe PDF witer from Acrobat professional 7.0.9

postscript = print dialog save PDF as Postscript

The results were suprising.

Picture.png

Maybe it is this file only, but it appears that Quartz Imaging causes smaller files in going to PDF and in the ps files.

And then it gets wierder, again for this file. I came to work and deleted all of my 800PS printers and resinstalled the 3.3 PS driver from HP and set up the printer again. Now PDFs and VW print in about the same time, regardless if Quartz is turned on or not. I am going to test with other files and other computers to see if this continues.

Islandmon, I found nothing in cups logs that indicated issues even in logs prior to reinstalling and recreating the printers. It just took longer to do the sam operations.

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Ion,

Checking the CUPS Logs for corruption is usually the first step. A CUPS issue is usually very specific.

Quartz will always create smaller files .. that's the power of the GPU code.

Core Foundation>Quartz is a major advancement with a tremendous future.

Eventually, all image manipulation should be handled by Quartz.

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