PrintJob Size

[2004 IR Help]

By: LucasUyezu - lucasuyezu

PrintJob Size

2005-10-04 06:00

Hi everybody,

 

I have one report here that generates printJobs of 250Kb per page.(It always has 1 page).

Since it's printed through a remote printer and the printjob goes through a ADSL connection, this size is still too big.

The former system (written in Delphi) generates a printjob of 28Kb. The report is visually identical to the one made with Jasper.

 

Can someone tell me how to reduce the printjob size?

 

Thanks in advance

 

 

 

 

 

By: Christoph J䧥r - cjae

RE: PrintJob Size

2005-10-04 08:02

Hi,

 

I just experienced something similar. The print job size depends on the printer driver and exactly how your print job is created.

 

Some clever algorithm in the printer driver (or before the printer driver in Windows, who knows) tries to translate the graphic primitives you use for drawing your report into the commands your printer understands (PCL5, PostScript, ...).

 

Now some drawing primitives are easy to translate (maybe a straight line, or a rectangular solid filled box), so their output will be small. Other primitives are more difficult, an example could be a polygon filled with a pattern. In this case, your printer language may not be able to draw a "polygon filled with a pattern", but the printer driver has to split this up into "polygon" (or maybe even several lines), and use other drawing commands to draw the filling pattern. This, of course, produces a huge output file. So every time you draw something, that is not easy to represent in your printer's language, the print job will be big (in the worst case, the printer driver has to send a bitmap to the printer).

 

What can you do to reduce print job size?

 

- Have a look at your graphics. I found that including any half transparent graphics element within an SVG graphic increases print job size a lot. This may be true also for very small graphics, as it may be possible that in case the printer driver finds any transparent parts, it will have to switch to a different mode and produce larger output.

 

- Use standard fonts, try not to use antialiasing, try replacing bitmap graphics with vector graphics. Any of these may decrease your print job size, but you will have to try it out.

 

Best Regards,

 

Christoph J䧥r