Fast personal printing _without_ CUPS

[John Levine]

I'm not a huge fan of CUPS, but at this point it's the best of a bad
lot.  I find the queueing useful, since I often print documents long
enough that I don't want to wait.

>More importantly, CUPS, for me at least, seems to be quite slow.
>There's a loooooooong pause after I queue something for printing
>until something actually comes out of the printer.

Yeah.  I have a similar printer with a similar problem.  I believe
that what's going on is that the current version of CUPS tells all the
clients to print to PDF, then for printers that don't handle PDF,
converts that to postcript using ghostscript which is very, very slow.

I think this is a bug. A few versions ago it used to tell clients to
print postscript which it can send directly to my printer.  I also
looked at using pdftops, which is much faster, to convert the PDF, but
the call to ghostscript and the ghostscript command options are wired
into the CUPS code and were more hassle to change than I wanted to do.

R's,
John