VERY slow printing

January 22, 200521 yr

I just installed FileMaker Developer 7v3. Previously used FM 6 Pro. Printing to a printer now takes about 15-20 seconds per page where before I could print several pages in a second. Printing with FM6 still fast, so nothing has changed in the environment.

Printing to a PDF slows down even more, so it is not unique to the real printer.

There are several other reports of slow printing, but I have not seen one as bad!

January 23, 200521 yr

Author

I've now tried a number of things:

- Printed to a file instead of the printer - slightly faster, but still VERY slow. File size for 8 pages is about 1 MB, so that is not what is making it so slow (file size is about the same as when FM6 prints to file).

- Original printer is an HP Laserjet. Now also tried a Cancon Inkjet. Still very slow.

- Tried new creating a new layout from scratch. Also prints slow.

Any ideas???

January 23, 200521 yr

Maybe your spooler is not functioning correctly; check your Windows settings. Also, try "Print directly to printer."

January 23, 200521 yr

Author

Turning off spooling just makes it slower. Note that the same pages still print lightning-fast from FM6.

Tried installing FM7 on my laptop running XP-SP2 and same results (actually slower since it is a slower machine).

Checked Windows Task Manager and the Filemaker process is using 50-99% of processor while printing.

As a perhaps related problem, several times in the middle of printing, FM7 has been terminated with the message "Filemaker Devel.exe has generated errors and will be closed by Windows. You will need to restart the program. An error log has been generated". I couldn't find any log...

January 26, 200521 yr

Author

I have determined the cause of the poor printing performance.

The pages being printed were columnar reports. By default, data fields in these reports have the Effects set to "Engraved". In FM6 and before, this caused no problem.

In FM 7, If Effects are set to "Engraved" or "Embossed", performance seems to go down the tubes. If Effects are set to "Drop Shadow" or "None", performance is fine.

To make sure that there was not some other conflict with the production database/layouts, I created a tine test database with one simple layout and the problem was quite reproducible.