What makes printing so difficult--how does it work under the covers?

[dbg]

I'm using VW 12.5 for an extremely simple task: I'm trying to generate a floor plan for a house my daughter is buying. I measured the rooms and drew corresponding rectangles on one layer that I used as a guide, then used the wall and door tools on another layer, snapping to my guide rectangles, to make the floor plan.

All works easily until I try to print. It's a simple document, 140 objects and a few layers (one layer is a grid of squares with various line widths to serve as graph paper). Except for walls and doors, the most complicated thing is a rectangle with white fill. OK, there's about 20 characters of text too.

But when I print, it's a catastrophe. Nothing ever comes out of the printer (HP LJ5M with extra memory) even if I wait 10 hours--the printer just stays busy "processing".

I try printing to PDF, and that goes very quickly and results in a tiny PDF file that displays fine on screen--but it too fails to print within 10 hours.

If I change the dpi to 72 the document prints in less than an hour, but still preposterously slow for its simple nature, and the quality of course is awful.

What works best is to do a screen capture, and print that.

I tried generating PostScript, and it distills rapidly to the PDF, which again views fine on screen but can't print in finite time.

Surely this can't be right--there must be something about printing that is weird with VW that I don't understand.

Can anyone help?

Is there any way to get the vectors and fills out to some other program that can print, like Illustrator?

[Ray Libby]

Since the PDF has the same behavior the problem probably isn't VW. Maybe try moving or taking out the memory and see if you have a bad chip?

[dbg]

Good suggestion.

Unfortunately, removing the extra memory, reseating it, etc., nothing fixed the problem. So perhaps the trouble is specific to the PostScript implementation on the 5M (its own board with 2MB on it). Or perhaps that board is bad. But it prints everything else we throw at it just fine, photos, newsletters, etc. Puzzling.

However, based on your suggestion I tried printing it on my Epson inkjet, and that works just fine. So I guess that's a workaround.

Thank you!

[Ray Libby]

Does the print dialog have an option to process the document in computer not in printer?

[gScott]

dbg,

our hp has a tab in the windows xp printing prefs dialog

called "services" with a "troubleshooting" button,

with a choice "send job as a bitmap (process in computer).

this works for us; without it selected we get random

memory complaints from the printer...

vw12.5 + win xp

[IanH]

I have Laserjet 5MP which I think may be the postscript version of the 5M that you have. Had it since new when it always felt super zippy.

Now a days, it feels so slow, even doing non VW stuff, ie spreadsheets or documents. I'm sure it was never this slow, but I have a feeling that it may be something in Vista (no HP Vista drivers so use generic Windows ones) or XP that has changed, possibly the former as I don't personally print much to it in XP that is time critical on output so don;t notice its speed.

You don't say what driver you are using or what OS you use.