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From: howie@triton.tamu.edu (MATT_K_HOWARD)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.system
Subject: Re: System 7 Slowness: Printing
Message-ID: <17576@helios.TAMU.EDU>
Date: 20 Jun 91 04:50:46 GMT
References: <1991Jun19.175431.27097@agate.berkeley.edu> <1991Jun20.113222.3378@covax.commerce.uq.oz.au>
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News-Software: VAX/VMS VNEWS 1.3-4

Many of you have written about slow printing under the system 7.
After reading that even trivial print jobs produced "HUGE" print
jobs I tried it myself.   I typed about 20 characters in QUED/M
using Monaco 12.  I used the "PostScript file" option in the print
dialog and produced a 507K file.   I examined the contents of the
postscript file and have convinced myself that along with laserprinter
initialization routines there are the instructions and data for 
downloading the true-type font set to the laserwriter.

I'm no postscript expert but if you will allow me to speculate out loud
then this is what I think is going on.

1.) I'm not hooked to a laserwriter.  The operating system cannot determine
    the state of the intended printer so it plays it safe and pre-appends
    the laser initialzation routines (these use to reside in the laser prep
    file of pre-system 7 systems.)  Furthermore, since I used a true-type
    font, the font descriptions are added, perhaps all of them.  Hence the 
    postscript file is huge.

2.) If you send a job to a laserwriter that has just been powered up or
    the previous job was sent by a cpu using pre-system 7 print drivers,
    then new initialization data and true-type font descriptions will be
    pre-appended to your job causing you delay.

3.) This "first-job" overhead seems to be about 500-600K.  This will
    be very noticeable on the lower power Macs, less so on those with
    more zip.

4.) Previous posts have said that beginning with system 7 "postscript file"
    print jobs "ALL" have the prep data added.  Previously, with the proper
    keyboard grip the user could cause or prevent the laser prep file from
    being pre-appended to the postscript file.  Perhaps the truetype fonts
    will always be added as well. (FYI Laser prep data is about 22 Kbytes,
    True-Type fonts appear to total 600K roughly).

5.) I believe that those of you experiencing the slow printing problem
    under system 7 are having problems because your files are huge and 
    that they are huge for the reasons presented above.  This should be
    normal behaviour for the first system 7 print job that a printer accepts.
    Subsequent print jobs should then process in a much speedier fashion
    since the printer will now already contain initialization and font
    data.  Perhaps someone who has been experiencing this problem could 
    send the same print job twice and report back here to the net their 
    results.


----  
Matt