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God! I hate PDFs!

Zorba

Zorba

Lifer
So I am sitting in one of the university's computer labs, because I have to use a special program. Well I print off my results, go up to the printer to see that some girl had just sent a 30 page PDF to the printer. So the printer prints off about one page every 20 or 30 seconds (a printer that usually can print off about 30 pages per minute). Now, that this has happened 5+ times to me in the last week I am ready to kill all PDFs. Does anyone know why it it takes so damn long for a printer to printer those damn things?
 
Originally posted by: Zorba
So I am sitting in one of the university's computer labs, because I have to use a special program. Well I print off my results, go up to the printer to see that some girl had just sent a 30 page PDF to the printer. So the printer prints off about one page every 20 or 30 seconds (a printer that usually can print off about 30 pages per minute). Now, that this has happened 5+ times to me in the last week I am ready to kill all PDFs. Does anyone know why it it takes so damn long for a printer to printer those damn things?
Click to expand...

Additional baggage that it contains for being able to be viewed on every platform
 
just wait until you are on a machine with the latest version of Reader, and it won't let you look at some .pdf files from earlier versions.
EDIT I had to upgrade to 6.0 to read some pdfs, but now, just in today, my browser has locked up 3 x's when trying to load older PDFs
 
That means that not only do I and the rest of the world hate them, you do too!

You can get a converter by a company called SCAN.

Too lazy to linkify, sorry
 
Could be related to size. If the PDF was poorly created, 30 pages could easily be anywhere between 10meg and 20 meg if there are lots of images and it's poorly optimized.

It takes a printer a while to churn out something like that.
 
PDF are annoying to load too, takes 30+ seconds to render ~10 pages, and more if you have a really long document. And one of my profs loves to put everything in pdf instead of a plain rtf document. Gah!!
 
Originally posted by: vi_edit
Could be related to size. If the PDF was poorly created, 30 pages could easily be anywhere between 10meg and 20 meg if there are lots of images and it's poorly optimized.

It takes a printer a while to churn out something like that.
Click to expand...

Yup, it definitely depends on the mental capacity of the individual who created the files.

I print out insurance applications every day from PDFs, and some 45 page applications zip right out, whereas I've had 8 page applications take three times as long.
 
Originally posted by: vi_edit
Could be related to size. If the PDF was poorly created, 30 pages could easily be anywhere between 10meg and 20 meg if there are lots of images and it's poorly optimized.

It takes a printer a while to churn out something like that.
Click to expand...

I just printed out a PDF manual for an ancient motherboard (8 whole pages) - I've got a Minolta 1250W printer. It printed them at the same speed as it would print a webpage or Word Document. The next paper would begin to load before the preceding page was completely done printing. Maybe they have the printer set up on a slow network, or maybe it's a standard parallel port printer. Or maybe the print server is a 486.
 
Originally posted by: Jeff7
Originally posted by: vi_edit
Could be related to size. If the PDF was poorly created, 30 pages could easily be anywhere between 10meg and 20 meg if there are lots of images and it's poorly optimized.

It takes a printer a while to churn out something like that.
Click to expand...

I just printed out a PDF manual for an ancient motherboard (8 whole pages) - I've got a Minolta 1250W printer. It printed them at the same speed as it would print a webpage or Word Document. The next paper would begin to load before the preceding page was completely done printing. Maybe they have the printer set up on a slow network, or maybe it's a standard parallel port printer. Or maybe the print server is a 486.
Click to expand...


Just depends on the original encoding. I've made 30meg PDF docs that only had 40 pages, and I've made 30 meg PDF docs that had over 3000 pages.
 
Originally posted by: yamahaXS
just wait until you are on a machine with the latest version of Reader, and it won't let you look at some .pdf files from earlier versions.
EDIT I had to upgrade to 6.0 to read some pdfs, but now, just in today, my browser has locked up 3 x's when trying to load older PDFs
Click to expand...

Yeah the school has 6.0 on all the computers, I think it is a piece of junk. I still use 4.0 on my home computer and it works just fine.

We have good print servers and they all connected to the printers over the 100base-T network. The only printer problems I ever have up here are with some PDFs. Granted some print just like text would.
 
Definitely has something to do with how the PDF was made. I create PDF's all day long to send out proofs to clients who'd rather see it in color than just another faxed transmission.

I can have a 30-40mb file that i can easily compress down to under a meg as a PDF (again only for proofing, not high quality output - that's what our imagesetter and web press is for).
 
Some PDFs are just a bunch of embedded JPEG files, those take forever. Others are just encapsulated post script files, those are small and print out quite quickly.

Edit: typo.
 
Originally posted by: Ranger X
If you have a better alternative to PDFs, I'd like to hear it.
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Just HTML would work for most of those files 🙂. But even if there isn't a better alternative I still hate them 😛.
 
If it's on a network printer, you can see the print status.

just cancel her print job 🙂 and send yours to print.

Her being a girl will probably have no clue why it's not printing and try to send it again.
 
Originally posted by: isekii
If it's on a network printer, you can see the print status.

just cancel her print job 🙂 and send yours to print.

Her being a girl will probably have no clue why it's not printing and try to send it again.
Click to expand...

:beer:
 
I love pdfs. they make my job a thousand times easier (lots of cross platform work). It sounds like someone did a pretty crappy job creating the pdf. My pdfs usually print as fast as any other document.
 
Originally posted by: isaacmacdonald
I love pdfs. they make my job a thousand times easier (lots of cross platform work). It sounds like someone did a pretty crappy job creating the pdf. My pdfs usually print as fast as any other document.
Click to expand...

Uhm, rtf is cross platform, txt is cross platform, most other platforms can read .doc's, etc...
 
Originally posted by: GigaCluster
Usually a networked queue will not give you permission to end another user's job.
Click to expand...


Walk up to the printer and press 'CANCEL JOB' Problem solved.

It's there on certain HP models.
 
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