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A colleague of mine has a few very large (100 pages, pictures of documents, size ranges from 200MB to 700MB) PDF files that she needs to print for research, but they take forever to send to a printer making it impossible to get them all printed. Is there a quick way to fix this? Splitting them into several small documents, or somehow start printing before all the pages are sent to the printer?

Chad Sexington said:

A colleague of mine has a few very large (100 pages, pictures of documents, size ranges from 200MB to 700MB) PDF files that she needs to print for research, but they take forever to send to a printer making it impossible to get them all printed. Is there a quick way to fix this? Splitting them into several small documents, or somehow start printing before all the pages are sent to the printer?

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Does your PDF viewer not allow you to specify a page range to print? If that's the case, I recommend installing the foxit PDF viewer, which does allow that.

I'd just print 10 pages at a time. Otherwise, you could check to see what type of printer driver you're using. If it's a PS, or Post Script, diver you could try switching to a PCL driver. PCL is a whole lot quicker, mainly because the amount of data sent to the printer is significantly less.

Shakey said:

I'd just print 10 pages at a time. Otherwise, you could check to see what type of printer driver you're using. If it's a PS, or Post Script, diver you could try switching to a PCL driver. PCL is a whole lot quicker, mainly because the amount of data sent to the printer is significantly less.

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I doubt this is an option, being university printers she's using.

GasBandit said:

Does your PDF viewer not allow you to specify a page range to print? If that's the case, I recommend installing the foxit PDF viewer, which does allow that.

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Hm; so just do 1-10, 11-20, etc? I'll suggest that.

Found this bit, maybe it'll help?

Do not print from browser

Save document to personal or temp drive
- Name file and remember where you saved it
- Do not save to desktop

Open PDF in Acrobat Pro
- File > Print
- In print dialog box push Advanced button
- Select Print As Image and set to 150 dpi

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She says printing 10 pages at a time didn't work either, so.. hrm. I'll advise her about the dpi, maybe... I don't think she's printing from a browser, since they're documents she personally photographed.

I would change the printing resolution (lower it), if that's an option.

Also, one could decrease the file size by exporting the file through Preview (if it's on a Mac).

It sounds like the problem is that many of the pages have high resolution images on them. Passing them through a PDF processor to reduce the PDF quality to "print" level (or even "screen" level) will probably resolve the problem.

This will require Adobe Acrobat Pro or another PDF processing software. "save as" or "export" should give you the option of altering the quality.

Otherwise, I'd suggest printing one page at a time, and finding which pages are causing the problem (it's probably not every single page). When you only have a few pages that aren't printing correctly, then convert them to images, then print (simplest method - take a screenshot then print that).

Another option you might have is to open them in microsoft word, then try printing. Word will convert the PDF to its own internal format, and then send more appropriate data to the printer even if the images are high resolution.

Since it's pictures of documents, you might try running the file through OCR first. That should reduce the file size significantly. Somebody at the university should have a full copy of Acrobat that can do the job.

If not, I can give you an upload link to my Dropbox and I'll do it. I have a computer or five around that can chew on it for a while, if need be.

She has Pro, so that should be fine... Does it do OCR? I really have no idea. But that might be just the thing to do...

Your printer is probably the issue. Sorta.

When you send a PDF to a printer, the printer has to rasterize each page. If your printer does not have enough memory/good enough CPU, this means the printer has to waste time scaling all the images to the proper size and output resolution, generating bitmaps for all the fonts, etc. For complex pages, this can take a loooong time.

As some people have already said, you can significantly speed up this process by using embedded images which are the same as your output resolution OR some PDF creation tools have the option to "reduce file size" or "reduce image size" so that all embedded images and such get scaled to match the document size/resolution, and then the printer doesn't have to waste time doing all that work. Alternatively, you can render the pages as images to your local drive as .PNG or .BMP or whatever at the desired output resolution, and then just send those over to the printer one at a time.

--Patrick

Or put the doc on a jump drive and go to Kinkos. Sure it'll be a couple bucks, but it won't use up all your toner & paper and you'll know it'll be done quick with little fuss.

Dave said:

Or put the doc on a jump drive and go to Kinkos. Sure it'll be a couple bucks, but it won't use up all your toner & paper and you'll know it'll be done quick with little fuss.

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That's what I thought, too.
But I went there a while back to have a 300dpi 8x10 photo restoration printed that I had done for my stepmother.
At first they thought the color laserprinter was broken because nothing was coming out. They fussed for a bit and we got a couple images about 20min later. I liked them, so I paid for them and went home.
The next day I went back for some reason, and I saw that there were about half a dozen or so more printouts of the photo left over from yesterday still sitting around (they let me have them). Turned out the delay was not due to equipment problems, it was just the time the printer took to parse/render and print the image, so all the extra times they sent the image while trying to get it to print finally emerged from the printer about half an hour after I left, and for some time after another one would pop out about every 15 min until someone got wise and cleared the remaining ones out of the queue.

--Patrick

Dave said:

Or put the doc on a jump drive and go to Kinkos. Sure it'll be a couple bucks, but it won't use up all your toner & paper and you'll know it'll be done quick with little fuss.

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There is apparently quite a price jump per/page at the Staples here for printing off a USB drive instead of a file from email or something. I have no idea why.

USB drives are far more likely to result in computer infections than email. Files in email are not trusted by default, but media you attach directly to the computer is trusted by default.

I'm not sure that clarifies why they would charge more per page. It jumps to like 40 cents/page, surely I can put a malicious file on my drive and spare that kind of change to infect a computer? Whereas if I legitimately want to print something, I'm being punished substantially.

Chad Sexington said:

I'm not sure that clarifies why they would charge more per page. It jumps to like 40 cents/page, surely I can put a malicious file on my drive and spare that kind of change to infect a computer? Whereas if I legitimately want to print something, I'm being punished substantially.

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It's not about your intentions, it's about the odds of you being unknowingly infected, and the cost to them if you are.

Oy vey. I feel like there could be a better system.

They jsut want to severely discourage people from using that method. They have it available for those that have no other choice, but really they'd rather not have it available at all.

There is a real cost to them for every hour a machine isn't working at a store, and a great deal of liability if they are infected and then pass that infection on to another customer's USB drive. So they spread that cost over the pages to make it more palatable. I doubt you'd be happier if it were a $25 per job cost to use the USB device, unless you were making a lot of copies.

At my local Kinko's FedEx Office, the upcharge happens if you want to print from .PSD or .DOC, but the price is substantially lower if you want to print from .JPG or .PDF, which they explained was solely to defray the cost of having to buy Photoshop/Office in the first place. They didn't seem to care whether the image came from USB, CD, DVD, or whatever. In fact, the option to print online was not even available due to the size of the file.

--Patrick