Hi, I tried to use Sumatra to print a 12 pages color pdf which is around 4.1mb. I found the print job becomes 44mb in size. I used Adobe Reader to do the same thing and the print job is only about 5mb. Also, when I tried to print to a shared print queue, it took 16 seconds to print but it took a few seconds on a local printer. Any performance I can tune? I am using the latest version of portal edition.
SumatraPDF passes rendered images (normally high resolution) unmodified pages to the printing system which in turn uses different resolutions set by the user in the printer driver.
Just tested a monochrome input (colour in theory should not matter as black is droplets/density of stock CMYK, but drivers do need to tell the printer what to apply at the print head, however each printer has its own language and some are more verbose than others)
2 x A0 pages out @ 72 dpi (5000 pixels per square inch) in driver =0.308 MB in spool file
same 2 pages @ 4000 dpi (16000000 pixels per square inch) in driver =23.6 MB in spool file
I tried 3 different printers supposedly at same resolution (300dpi) which for 2 pages at A4 should be about 17,401,264 pixels (say potentially 16.6 Mb) one driver produced a 4.2 MB output the other 1.6 MB a differential ratio of 2.65x so again not a simple case of one doubling the pixels of the other, which should not have been the case anyway. Nor can we assume pixels translates to MB since the HP inkjet driver output was ONLY 0.46MB in any quality or colour mode
On closer inspection (saved as pdf) the larger one has the crisp anti-aliased grey scale pixel quality reminiscent of pre-press @ 600dpi
And I can confirm the outputs from Acrobat were the leanest at 1.07 MB , 0.340 MB & 1.06 (but note the HP inkjet output is ~2.3x bigger than with SumatraPDF) However the visual quality of the smallest greyscale output was very inferior (reminiscent of lossy blocks)
Thus you can’t easily guess the simple effects of doubling resolution (it is more than the normal quadrupled) but it is clearly going to be much much bigger.
Adobe write PS drivers that are optimised to the hilt, Acrobat uses Adobe system
Network printing involves more spooler parsing communications i.e. 2 way network confirmation that large blocks of data have been verified takes extra time
Some users try to hook printing directly into the local server, avoiding attendant authorisation issues or perceived user delays, by using the traditional redmon approach of a printer in-tray folder.