Printing PDF files takes for ever?

[realized]

I have had this problem for some time and figured i'd ask here =)

I have a few HP 4000's, toshiba e-studio 650 and a 4050 all over the office. Some are directly connected to the computers and some aren't.

seems like 99% of the time it takes for ever to print a small PDF file. I think it has something to do with it trying to spool like 30 mb for a 1mb pdf file which i dont understand.

I have tried PS and PCL drivers with no benifit to either.

any ideas?

[cluberti]

seems like 99% of the time it takes for ever to print a small PDF file. I think it has something to do with it trying to spool like 30 mb for a 1mb pdf file which i dont understand.

This happens because a PCL print driver must convert the PDF file to a format it understands (and it's converting the whole document to a bitmap...), thus causing the huge baloon in size from the original PDF to the actual print job file before it's spooled and printed. PostScript print drivers shouldn't cause this type of problem, however, as they should be able to handle the PDF natively - however, there can be differences in the techniques used by the print vendor in the PDF formats they expect and the format the PDF was generated in by Adobe, causing other types of issues when printing PDFs. You could try unchecking the "Enable Advanced Printing Features" option on the print queue properties to print RAW instead of EMF for PCL drivers to disable the advanced output EMF can provide, but you'll still have the bmp conversion (just a smaller bmp file, without the extra EMF data) and the slowness to spool if the queue is local. The files can get even larger if the PDF file has embedded fonts

I have tried PS and PCL drivers with no benifit to either.

There's not much more you can do other than deal with it, as this is an issue with the print driver handling the PDF format - it's never pretty.