Oh, yes. PDFs. That files that contains all the downsides of a full feature PS document but without any advantage. I don't know how are they translated into PCL, but surely produces heavy documents. The key is how much elements have a PDF and how are they mixed. A PDF may contain bitmaps, vectors, font definitions and plain text, with colours and transparencies and so on. As with 3D games, if your PDF has many elements that overlaps and modify other elements, it will take too much power to process, and the printer will need more memory.
A long time ago I saw a document that eat up all memory in a copier. It was a single A3 map (full of vectors and shades) and it eat up 128Mb of memory. But I guess that a full colour high resolution map was not meant for a monochrome printer.
You have a point, but if you made that PDFs you should reconsider how are you producing them. On the other hand, there are a few steps that can avoid that out of memory messages...
- In some printers/drivers/programs, there were options that let you send the file page by page (a page is not sent to the printer before the last one has been printed). If your documents are too big, this may avoid the document to fill the memory before a page is rasterized.
- Did you set correctly your memory options in the driver? That was not autodetected in earlier printers, so if your printer have 512Kb and the driver thinks it have 1Mb it will send data until it overrun all the available memory.
- Are you using features like overlays or watermarks? That features are sent as two pages (one the overlay, other the actual page) and mixed into the printer, so they can eat up memory (not a very used feature, but...). The same applies to fonts. Even if they are not used, they're eating up memory.
- Printing as bitmaps. This option may be set in your software or your driver (although I don't know if this is a feature only present in HP drivers or the generic Windows drivers also have it. The entire page is processed in the computer, so the printer don't have to cook it and take less memory to print it. Data sent to the printer is bigger, quality may be reduced, but the document can be printed.
- Lowering the printer resolution: Setting the driver to print as 300dpi instead of 600 will surely lower the quality but take much less memory.
BTW, I see that your printer already has PS installed. Another option could be trying to print the same document using another (the PS) driver. It shouldn't work, but sometimes it does.
I have traveled across the universe and through the years to find Her.
Sometimes going all the way is just a start...
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