  Troubleshooting printing in DT Max |
When experiencing printing problems, always consider the following:
- Make sure that you are using the most recent driver available for your
printer.
Driver upgrades may solve specific printer errors, and they include features
that are designed to enable optimal performance with the newer applications.
The newest drivers are available on the manufacturers Web sites.
- Many printer properties can be adjusted to improve the speed and efficiency
of print jobs.
To access your printer properties,
- click Start;
- select Settings;
- select Printers;
- under Windows XP, click Start and select Printers and Faxes;
- right-click the appropriate printer;
- select Properties.
The next step depends on the specific problem you are experiencing. Below is a
summary of various printing problems that you may encounter, followed by
troubleshooting tips.
- The printer reports an error and then stops printing /
Problems occur when attempting to print large jobs
In your printing preferences, if the Transmission Retry option is available,
increase its value in the Timeout settings frame.
- Printing may be slow if print spooling is not enabled
In the Advanced tab, select the options Spool print documents so program
finishes printing faster and Start printing after last page is spooled.
- Printing may be slow due to the spooling format
In the Advanced tab, click Print Processor. Then, in the Default Data Type
drop-down list, select the alternate spooling format.
The spooling formats
available are EMF and RAW. EMF can free up your program faster but it
requires more memory resources from your system. Therefore, if you are
experiencing problems with it, just switch to RAW format.
- Printing may be slow if the resolution setting is too high
In the General tab, click Printing Preferences and decrease the
DPI (dots per inch) setting selected.
For instance, if you are currently using a resolution of 600 DPI or higher,
try lowering the setting to 300 DPI or even 150 DPI.
- Printing may be slow if the soft fonts are not enabled
In your Printer Preferences, select Send TrueType as Bitmaps.
- Printing may be irregular (e.g. no shading) or slow if using an
invalid driver or an erroneous printer language
Use a PCL language driver if available rather than the PostScript
driver.
- Printing may be slow when too many applications are active
Close any applications which you do not need to keep opened.
- Printing may be slow if hard disk space is too low or your TEMP directory
is not configured properly
Print jobs must be spooled to the hard drive before being sent to the printer.
Limited hard disk space (less than 200 megs) may reduce the processing speed
of those jobs. Make sure that the TEMP directory in your Windows environment
is referenced to a drive with sufficient disk space.
- Printing may be slow if memory resources are insufficient
Keep in mind that if your printer evolves in a minimal environment, it will
deliver a minimal performance.
Because limited memory slows down the printing process, don't hesitate to
install additional memory into your computer and/or printer if possible. The
more RAM you can install on your printer, the better it will perform.
- Print jobs are performed in pieces, on separate pages
The capture timeout setting may be too low. If there is a pause in the flow of
data between the application and the port, and it is long enough for the
timeout to end the print job, the next data that comes will be sent to the
queue as if it were a new print job. The new job will be printed on a new
page because a form feed is prompted.
Misinterpreted control characters in a job may also prompt a form feed in the
middle of the printing process. Sometimes, this problem can be corrected by
sending the job as byte stream.
There is also the possibility that the printer may not have sufficient memory
to hold the entire page to be printed. In that case, it will print the part of
the page it does have in memory and continue printing on the next page. This
problem often occurs when printing large graphics jobs.
October 31, 2005
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