Home / Too slow when printing

I am using Sumatra as my default pdf readear, OS is Windows 10 pro 64bit, Dell 5820 tower desktop and Dell E5470 laptop.

It will take no less than 3 minutes to transfer data to Fuji-Xerox laser printer when I try to print 10 pages pdf contents, then I can do nothing to Sumatra. there is no this issue on any other pdf readers.

did you ever have this issue? thanks.

The speed at which windows spools the files combined with the expanded size of the data will create slowdown until handover so if you are decompressing heavily compressed pages to very high resolution then windows has to recompose all those bits in a page that are sent 1 after the other 10 times before releasing the app then SumatraPDF has to wait for the “all clear” before moving on

1. If you have control over the pdf production look very closely at what is final user requirement for printing as well as reading. Always avoid compression no reader will thank you for small but slow files.
2. look at print driver system settings such as spooling will those impact the user experience?
3. SumatraPDF is a document reader with added basic ability to let windows do the printing if you need a pdf printer application there are dedicated ones produced by adobe and others or use acrobat which was extensively developed for graphics studio print output so has pre-flight etc.

To be perfectly honest Sumatra is just not great when it comes to printing, at all. I’m guessing using the ancient v3.0 instead with the “print as image” option turned off will solve the problem, but that isn’t a long-term solution of course. As recommended above if you need to print a lot of different PDFs then Adobe or another PDF reader might be better suited to your needs.

Very appreciated your great reply and comments. thanks.

As recommended above if you need to print a lot of different PDFs then Adobe or another PDF reader might be better suited to your needs.

Can this information be put into the app itself? Some kind of a warning dialog that would pop up when the user tries to print, with a “Don’t show this again” option?

I just printed a 4 page PDF and it took over a minute. Then I printed the same document from Firefox and it was much faster (about 10 second total). I have Windows 7.

As others noted, Chrome is also faster, so as everybody has some kind of a web browser installed, the warning text could something like “Warning! SumatraPDF is not optimized for printing. The printing might take many minutes. Try instead opening this PDF in your web browser and print it there, which is according to user reports much faster.”

Regards,
David