[PLUG] Questions re lpr and imaging

[John Jason Jordan]

Not an option. Kinko's would charge 7 cents per side, creating a cost
of 10.50 per copy. I don't have $2,500 in my budget for this project.
My cost per page for toner is 1/4 of one cent per page. More important,
as the professor once opined about the climate in Africa, "it eats
books." Therefore, the paper must be heavy duty. And I have already
purchased the paper (108 gsm).

I think I need some way to massage the PDF into a more svelte
appearance. It needs either a girdle or a diet, and fast.

On a deeper level, I need to discover ways to print DTP files from Linux. 



On Fri, 16 Oct 2009 06:18:39 +0000
dcouch at gmail.com dijo:

> I don't know but it seems that taking your one copy to kinkos would be cost equivalent to printing 250 copies of a 150 page document in terms of paper and toner...Not to mention your sanity.
> Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: John Jason Jordan <johnxj at comcast.net>
> Date: Thu, 15 Oct 2009 23:08:44 
> To: PLUG<plug at lists.pdxlinux.org>
> Subject: [PLUG] Questions re lpr and imaging
> 
> 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. 
> 
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