I had a very similar problem with a 1300 printer. And yes, the client had like 
50 of them, so telling them to "buy something that doesn't suck as much 
as this crap" wasn't an option.
However, we were printing the documents ourselfes with a little Java program 
and the JPedal library and had to learn the hard way, so to say. I don't 
know exactly how Acrobat prints internally, and it largely depends on the 
document itself (Type1 vs Type3 vs TTF, etc.), but you need to understand 
that printing a simple character "b" can be done in two ways, basically:
a) the smarter, but not always feasable way would be: "drawString(Font font, 
Color bg, Color fg, int x, int y, String "b")" (in Pseudo code, of course)
b) less smart: Line 0, 0 - 0, 19. bezier .... line... stroke.. fill...

You see, you can either simply tell the print processor to use a specific font, 
color, pattern, etc. and draw a character at a specific location or 
you can draw the character totally by yourself. if you have a PDF with (I 
think) Type 3 fonts, you basically don't have a PDF with a lot of text, but 
only a PDF with a lot of drawing commands and not really text anymore. Printing 
such a document CANNOT be done the easy way and needs a lot of memory. 
So it goes back to what document do you really have to print?
You can also have a document with a 24bit background graphics over the whole 
page. In the PDF size, this might also be a small 100k PDF itself, but 
when you print it (or display it) you need memory to display that image. If you 
need to print the document, you need to transfer the data to the 
printer, etc. It really depends on your document.

Best regards,
Rog


tib wrote:
> Roger Misteli <roger.misteli <at> abacus.ch> writes:
> 
>> Depends on the printer model you have. Very low end models like hplj1200 or 
> 1300 have very limited memory and
>> very limited processing power. The 
>> printer does not support the full PCL 5 or 6 standard and the printer driver 
> on the client machine is used to
>> basically create bitmaps from the 
>> missing features. Depending on the features you use, this could be indeed 
> completely translated into a bitmap.
>> For such printers, there is not really a solution. You're basically fuched. 
> JPedal has a Java library that
>> supports viewing and printing. They 
>> introduced special print modes for PCL printers last year, so you might have 
> more success using their code.
>> But the problem remains: Those low end HP 
>> printers are, sorry, basically crap. The higher end models with more memory 
> are better suited for that task.
>> Best regards,
>> Rog
> 
> Thanks.
> But the "machine pool" (printers) are not interchangeble. :-(
> Bye :-)
> 
> 
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