Q: PDF documents generated by QuarkXPress, Office, Illustrator, etc.
are manipulated by our solution and printed to a large variety of hi-
volume printers (Kodak Digimaster and Nexpress, Konica Minolta, OCE,
Xerox, Canon and Ricoh). To get the PDF to paper we use PostScript,
sending PDF to the printers is no option (most vendors say they
support the PDF 1.4 but in fact support PDF 1.3 with some extra
additions causing just a lot of problems), using PCL 5 also no option
because of the file size.
Using the attached PDF document in the Print sample from the SDK,
printing it to PostScript, 300 dpi and no color profile selected
(should be done on the printer for maximum quality) we note the
following:
Example 1, 90 sec. 465 MB spool file on color printer –> Black
text printed RGB ( fat characters).
Challenges:
Printing is a slow process using PDFDraw class, the spool file size
limits the use (big documents do not fit in the spool space 4Gb
limit), splitting documents is also no option because of online
finishing options on the hardware.
The output is still VISIBLE rasterized on color as well as black and
white printers, this type of quality is unacceptable for our
customers.
A lot of articles are found in the knowledgebase about printing, one
article caught my attention, 'Speeding PDF printing', you write "The
upcoming PDFNet version will print PDF much faster (and faster than
Acrobat) on any Windows platfrom with WinFX support."
Question:
How can I create high quality, small sized, output (similar to Adobe
Acrobat reader) ?
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A: For high-quality and efficient printing you would need to print the
job via XPS print path. There are two ways to take advantage of this
print path:
1) The simplest approach is to use 'pdftron.PDF.Print.StartPrintJob()'
as shown in the updated PDFPrint sample (http://www.pdftron.com/pdfnet/
samplecode.html#PDFPrint).
2) The alternative is to use 'pdftron.PDF.Convert.TpXps()' to convert
PDF to XPS and use MS XPS Print API (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/
library/ff686814(v=VS.85).aspx) to print the resulting file. XPS is a
new spool format in Vista/Windows 7/2008 Server, so essentailly you
would be converting PDF directly to spool format.
The advantage of 'pdftron.PDF.Print.StartPrintJob()' is that is it
very simple to use and also works on systems without XPS print support
(e.g. XP, Server 2003, etc. Also it does not require additional
licensing which is required for 'pdftron.PDF.Convert.TpXps()'.
Before starting testing you may also want to make sure that you heave
the latest version (PDFNet v.5.1 - http://www.pdftron.com/downloads/).
For more info please see:
http://groups.google.com/group/pdfnet-sdk/browse_thread/thread/5c7f13c3f2bf2ef4