How to make printer print faster?

Marco Beishuizen marco at beishuizen.info
Wed Dec 10 07:33:19 PST 2003


On stardate Wed, 10 Dec 2003, the wise Mark Terribile entered:

> I'm wondering if the problem is that everything going through APSFILTER is
> sent as Postscript or raster.  If this is on a 4.x (did you say 4.9?) then
> you are limited to the 1.1 Meg/sec of USB1 (I'm assuming that it's a USB
> printer).  USB2 is 450 times faster, and may remove a bottleneck.  On the
> other hand, the bottleneck may be the speed at which the printer can process
> either Postscript or its raster data.  And that may depend on some resolution
> settings.
>
> I can't think of how to measure these things offhand, but that's where I
> would start.
>
>     Mark Terribile

Most of the time I'm printing from a PIII450 which runs FreeBSD
4.8-release and an Alpha which runs 4.7-release (I know I should upgrade
but that's another issue :)). The printer is connected to a small network
at home, three computers all running FreeBSD and the printer, all
connected to a switch. Sometimes I plug a laptop from my work into the
network, which runs Windows 2000.

Now I think that the data sent to the printer is PostScript and not PCL
(if this is possible, I'm no expert on this but I guess that's the reason
Windows is printing a lot faster) and that I should install a so called
"PostScript emulator DIMM". Problem is that these are hard to find since
the LaserJet 2100 is an old model now.

I just got a tip on the mailinglist that they are still being sold at
http://www.printerworks.com. Now I hope that they deliver to Europe also
and that the company can be trusted...

Marco
-- 
Finagle's Second Law:
	No matter what the anticipated result, there will always be
someone eager to (a) misinterpret it, (b) fake it, or (c) believe it
happened according to his own pet theory.


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