Slow spooling/printing

[jensen]

I run a database for a mailing company and each of our jobs involve the printing of thousands of pages (address carrier sheets) with both static and variable data. Each page typically contains a company logo (pict file approx. 40kb), name and address details of the mail pieces' recipient and a questionaire with tick boxes.

The database was created in FM4 and was/still is running perfectly, feeding 2 HP 8150 printers. When I recently converted the database to FM7 I found that the actual database runs quite a bit faster both on finds and on sorts but I ran into problems with the printing. Spooling takes an awful lot longer, up to a second per page and when the spooling finally finishes, the applications keeps working (wheel spinning) on the job for half an hour to an hour after that, depending on the job size.

If I split the job into say printing 1,000 pages at a time I am OK on the first 1,000 pages but when spooling the second batch of 1,000 pages, I have a very long wait until the spolling starts and as before a very long wait after the spooling appears to have finished (spinning wheel). Subsequent attempts at spooling a further 1,000 pages have taken so long that I have had to abandon printing the job all together.

I am not sure whether this is a FM problems or if it is related to MacOS X but would appreciate any feed back.

[Vaughan]

Try re-building one of the printing layouts from scratch (new graphics, not copied from old layouts or anything) and see if that helps.

[jensen]

Thanks. I have tried that with no luck. When removing graphics and/or text from the layout, the spooling does speed up but still nowhere near the spooling speed in FM4 so presumably it has to do with the size of the print file that is created. If that is the case then I can't see why the print file should become so much bigger in FM7 than in FM4.

[Barbecue]

HP's printer drivers often suck.

Try printing one page to a file, and see how big the result is. Also, are you printing postscript or PCL? Whichever you're doing, do the opposite and see what happens.