Different print times for scanned docs

[ksudavid]

We are trying to chase down a printing problem we are having with scanned documents. One of our teams scans marked up documents to PDF and sends them to us for review. When we print these scanned documents we get 1 of 2 results. Either the documents print in a reasonable amount of time or we wait a long time for the print job to complete. As an example today we had one PDF print 11 pages in 5 minutes. A 4 page PDF from the same team took over 20 mins.

We are trying to pin down what the persons on the team might be doing different with their scanner settings that would cause the difference. In the meantime does anyone know what I can investigate in the PDF's themselves?

Thanks

[Will - Tracker Supp]

Hi ksudavid,

Thanks for the post - could you please go to Help --> About in the Viewer and advise on the build that you're using? Also, I'd strongly recommend giving the Editor a try, as it has now replaced the Viewer and the printing engine has been entirely re-written.

Download: https://www.pdf-xchange.com/PDFXVE3.zip

Cheers,

[ksudavid]

Version 2.5 Build 214.2

The problem has nothing to do with file size. But there is something different about how the individual members of the remote team are scanning these docs that causes a printing problem. I could share privately if needed.

A couple of us do have the Editor installed but for many of the same reasons you've seen posted before we can't switch yet. There is still some core functionality that has not made it to the Viewer that we use. One is the missing Set As Default in the property settings. I will though test the printing via PDF Editor.

[Will - Tracker Supp]

Hi ksudavid,

Thanks for getting back to me - the options to set properties as default has already been implemented in the latest build of the Editor. For text annotations, such as the typewriter and textbox tools, this has been added to the toolbar. For other annotations, this is available from the right click context menu and will be added to the toolbar in a future release, so I'd recommend making sure that you have build 307.2 and testing with that.

With regards to the Viewer print times, I'm afraid that there's very little that we can do here, as there were some barriers with the Viewer printing engine, which was one of the reasons that the Editor's printing engine was rewritten, so the Dev. Team won't be making further changes to this aspect of the Viewer. Please do try testing with the Editor and you will likely find that it solves your issue. If it doesn't, then we'll certainly dig deeper.

Cheers,

[ksudavid]

Thanks but I'm not looking for your team to change something with your print driver. I'm trying to chase down what we are doing on our end when we scan the documents to create the problem. The file sizes and DPI scan setting are the same so there must be something else. I think eventually we'll find out what our guys are doing different but I was hoping you could show me a trick I could use to interrogate the docs and find out what's different between them.

Thanks for letting me know about the Editor update. I'll give that a try also.

[Will - Tracker Supp]

Hi ksudavid,

I'm actually not sure that it's necessarily something that you are doing. If the settings, scanner and pages are the same, then it sounds like a difference in the way that the scan is being handled. Please do try the Editor though, and let me know if that helps.

Cheers,

[ksudavid]

Yes, the Editor did perform better. You can still tell there's a difference in the docs but the print time with the Editor is fast enough that the problem is negligible.

[Stefan - PDF-XChange]

Hi ksudavid,

Glad to hear the Editor is performing better!
I assume that the "print as images" checkbox might have been ticked in the Viewer, and a very high DPI setting selected for printing images/gradients. This will result in huge amounts of data being sent to the printer and a very slow print process at times.

Regards,
Stefan

[ksudavid]

Print as Images was not checked so we still don't know the culprit.

[Stefan - PDF-XChange]

Hi ksudavid,

Then it was something else in the Viewer. In any case - glad that the Editor works properly for you. It's printing engine is rewritten from scratch so it should not suffer from the same drawbacks that the Viewer had.

Regards,
Stefan