[PLUG] Questions re lpr and imaging

John Jason Jordan johnxj at comcast.net
Fri Oct 16 06:08:44 UTC 2009


I have a 90 MB PDF file that was supplied to me by the assistant to a
PSU professor. I need to print 250 copies of this 152 page file to a
Laserjet 8000DN (Clonescript 2.0, gobs of RAM, all the options). And my
Jaunty x86_64 computer has a dual-core 2GHz CPU and 4 GB of RAM.

The problem is that the file was created in Adobe InDesign by someone
who had never used InDesign before. Worse, while she is a great artist,
she has little concept of outputting images to lasers. The file has
hundreds of TIFF images at 300 dpi. All I have is the PDF; I have no
access to the original and, even if I did, the last version of InDesign
that I have is CS, where she used CS4.

So I am struggling trying to get output from this file within my
remaining lifetime. Oh, did I mention that the professor needs to take
the copies with him when he leaves for Africa on October 24?

I can print from Adobe Reader 9.1, but it takes 25 minutes for the
print job to start printing, and 24 minutes for one copy to print. The
printer is rated at 24 ppm and a normal 152 page file takes about eight
minutes per copy. And "RIP once, print many" doesn't work from Linux,
so each copy is re-imaged over and over; that is, each subsequent copy
takes as long to print as the first copy.

If I print from Okular I can shave a couple minutes off those figures,
but it's still hopeless. Worse, Okular's number of copies dialog box is
broken. You can specify any number you want, but you're going to get
one copy.

Evince does even worse than Adobe Reader 9.1

Foxit Reader is even worse than Evince.

So I spent half an hour printing to .ps file from Okular. Now I am
trying to send the .ps file with lpr, but it's not going anywhere at
all. I am using the following command:

lpr -P Laserjet_8000_Series -#4 -o Collate=True -o media=letter -o
sides=two-sided-long-edge ~/Kim\ \&\ Bom/Full\ Bom\ primer\ 15\ Oct\ 09
\ 2.ps

The command executes reasonably quickly, and a print job then appears
in Manage Print Jobs. But the print job appears to go nowhere. When I
look in System Monitor nothing is doing anything. I mean, if
Ghostscript  or some other process was wailing along at 100% CPU I'd
feel that at least something was happening. Cupsd sits and does
nothing, and nothing else that sounds like it has anything to do with
printing is doing anything. At the same time grep is sucking down one
of the CPU cores at close to 50%. Grep? What does grep have to do with
printing?

If anyone knows how to kick lpr in the butt, I'd like to know. Any
other suggestions are also welcome. 




More information about the PLUG mailing list