Batch Printing is now unusably slow in VW2015

[baronjutter]

So our office has been using VW2013 for as long as we could. I do wish we could just buy the product once and only "upgrade" every few years (if the new version is worth upgrading to). Some other offices we exchange work with finally "upgraded" to 2015 so we decided why not, we're paying a huge sum per year to get these "upgrades".

At first we were very confused by the new "publish" system. All we do is batch print and batch export to PDF, we have no need for these saved-sets. There was a lot of stress from this new menu and the whole process just has pointless added steps now. But we got over it.

What we can't get over is how SLOW printing is now. Before once we hit "print" a little window would open for a few seconds and quickly spit out the drawings to the printer and we'd be back to work. Now it takes about 5-10 seconds per page to process the print command, so when we're printing out 50 signs, there goes your ability to work for quite a while.

It does this regardless of the printer we're sending it to. It's so bad most of the office have gone back to 2013.

What could be causing this? Why can 2013 process a huge batch print job in seconds while 2015 takes minutes?

[PVA - Admin]

Does the same delay occur when you publish a batch to PDF? Or only when using direct printing? Do you see the slowness when printing that batch of exported PDFs as well?

[baronjutter]

Publish to PDF goes pretty fast, like a half second per page. It's just publish to printer that takes a very very very long time.

[PVA - Admin]

If printing from the published PDFs also doesn't have the delay, i would use that method for the time being.

There are changes coming to improve speed and compatibility with printers. Similar to how our PDF exports are so large currently there are methods we want to employ to reduce how much non-visible information is being included in exports and print jobs. Some of that is controllable now with Rasterize Text, but there are many other components in a drawing that could be rasterized or flattened to save time and space.

EDIT: Apologies, Rasterize Text might be in Vectorworks 2016 but not in Vectorworks 2015. I am not sure when it was introduced.

Edited January 13, 2016 by JimW

[baronjutter]

So there's no way to fix this in 2015? 2016 isn't compatible with our office computers so I think we'll just go back to 2013 since we haven't found any new features or fixes to old bugs in this new version, just slower printing and a load of new bugs (like over time every button in the interface being replaced with text that says "button" and the program eventually crashing).

I know wayyyy back in the day you could just buy vectorworks like a normal piece of software, not pay yearly to "rent" it while constantly having to update to new versions to get any sort of support. Is there no option to purchase the software this way? Like just buy a dozen copies of 2013 and done?

[PVA - Admin]

Did you contact support about the "button" button issue? I have not come across that in 2015 that I can recall.

The problem is that Vectorworks 2015 has already gotten its last service pack, its unlikely that there will be any more patches for that version in the future.

We still sell Vectorworks as a unit with perpetual licensing, Service Select isn't really renting it, as you keep whatever software you have if you end the service agreement. But I am not sure if its possible to purchase versions that are a few years old, but its worth checking with your sales rep to see if they can work something out with you.

[baronjutter]

Thanks for all the info. I'm just staff here so when it comes to the purchasing/license angle I'm only basing things off 2nd hand info.