Topic awaiting preservation: HUGE printfiles... (Page 1 of 1)

Why is it, that when I try to print my 50-page pdf-file on just 400k
with lowres-pics, it gets 800 MB in the printer jobque-list??

You would think that a 400 k file would be smaller even when
you print it, wouldn't you?

I think I found an answer to my own question.. or at least it is a theory;

PDF is using postscript, right? But I have no postscript-printer here so the postscript
must be transformed and unpacked to another page-description-language which takes
up much more ram, right?

Seems reasonable at least and then I guess that IF I had had a postscript printer,
the printjob had been much smaller and easier to print!

no matter how (postscript, gdi, whatever), the printer needs to 'render' the pages and transform them into pixel by pixel presentations.
Of course that should be happening inside the printer, page by page, but
with a GDI printer (ie. most cheap ones), it's done on the windows machine, needing a lot of space.

PDF itself does not use Postscript. But when you print on a Postscript printer, it needs to be converted by the driver.

Tyberius Prime

Hmm, okay.. :s

But if PDF don't use postscript, how come EPS-images show up correct in a PDF?
Because EPS uses postscript, doesn't it?

If you place an eps-image in Quark or Pagemaker it just uses the preview image within
the eps-file because these layout-program doesn'´t handle postscript.

Am I right?

Yes. EPS is literally Encapsulated PostScript. It embeds the postscript into the placed file.

PDFs to my knowledge have all postscript embedded as well.

As far as the job size goes, yeah, it's 400k because its compressed.
PDFs are cool like that.
But I don't know that the print file would be any smaller going to a postscript printer. If you want, we can try it.
You can email it to me.