Re: printing

[bill@cambridge.apple.com (Bill St. Clair)]

>I have experienced similar problems when printing to an ImageWriter. I first
>noticed (and reported) this with an early MACL release; the poor printing
>performance
>is still present in MCL 2.0b1p3. I would say that the time to print a page of
>text is about an order of magnitude longer in MCL than in other applications
>such as MacWrite II and MORE 3.
>
>It takes a while to begin printing the start of the page. After every few
>passes
>of the printhead, the printer pauses for a long time (longer than the "active"
>phase when the printer was active). Size of the memory partition, revision of
>the OS and printer driver, and speed of the machine (I've run into this on
>both
>a Plus and an SE/30) have no significant effect on the speed of printing.
>
>I once saw a note about a problem in the ImageWriter driver that involved
>waiting
>for a timeout of some 20 seconds or so if you don't feed it fast enough - the
>author stumbled upon this when trying to spoof programs into printing while
>in the background. I don't know whether this is related, although the 20
>second
>delay seems similar to what I experience between bursts of printing in MCL.

I just timed some printing on an ImageWriter.

In 2.0b1 out of the box, it took 4 minutes 40 seconds to print a 2.25 page
document. With the printing patch loaded, it took 2 minutes 45 seconds.
I'm running system 7.0 on a Mac IIfx. With the patch loaded, the printer
never paused. Hence, the relative speedup for a slower machine will probably
be greater.