Any solutions for PowerPoint's PIGGISH printing?

  • Thread starter Thread starter klunk
  • Start date Start date
K

klunk

To be honest, I'm thoroughly disgusted with
PowerPoint's problems when printing, but maybe
there are some solutions to the worst of them.

First, is there anyway to get PowerPoint to optimize its
output for a target device? For example, printing a 300
slide presentation as 2 per page handouts, as grayscale,
yields a postscript file nearly 2 Gigabytes in size! There
is obviously no downsampling of images going on. Our
Docutech RIPs either barf or take forever to complete
the jobs.

I've even tried running the Postscript through Distiller
to squash the images, but it ends up taking longer in
total between all the steps.

Any suggestions?
 
Dear Klunk --

Have you tried saving a copy of the presentation file that is optimized for
printing? If not, try this:

1. Go to File | Save As.
2. Click Tools and then Compress Pictures
3. Try playing with the various controls there,
all of which are self-evident.

Let us know...
 
Have you tried saving a copy of the presentation file that is optimized for
printing? If not, try this:

1. Go to File | Save As.
2. Click Tools and then Compress Pictures
3. Try playing with the various controls there,
all of which are self-evident.

Let us know...
Click to expand...

Thanks for your response.

Yep. I should've provided more info in my first post.
Here's the info and settings for a particular PPT job
which I just processed:

PowerPoint 2002 SP2
239 Slides (PPT file is 1MB)
File|Save As - Tools|Compress Pictures
- All
- Print (200 dpi)
- Both options checked
Tools|Options - Printing
- "Print TrueType fonts as graphics" not checked
- "Print inserted objects at printer resolution" is checked
Printing to Xerox DT6135 PS3 (or file with same settings).
- Postscript optimized for speed
- Handouts 2 per page
- Grayscale

This either sends to the printer or creates a postscript file
that is over 1.5GB in size -- which is 12MB per page.
 
Have you tried unchecking "Print inserted objects
at printer resolution" ?
Click to expand...

Yes -- and it doesn't seem to have any impact on output
size.

I ran more tests with some "interesting results":

Previously, printing to the Printer or to file yielded the
same size output.

However, now they're different (and I haven't been able
to pinpoint why) Printing to the Printer sends a 120 page
1.5 GB file which takes about 4 minutes to send to the
DT6135 printer spooler, and a total of 10 minutes to spool
to the DT6135.

If I print to file it creates a 250 MB postscript
file, which if I run through distiller for 600 dpi output creates
a 1 MB PDF file. Printing that PDF from Acrobat to the DT6135
sends a 25 MB file to the printer spooler in about 30 seconds.
What's weird is that it then takes 10 minutes to spool to the
DT6135!

The workstation is 2 GHz, plenty of RAM and disk space,
network is 100 Mbps switched. Don't have problems like
this with printing from other Apps.
 
Klunk, is the file emailable or FTPable? I wouldn't mind benchmarking
it over here. If so, email me at

rick DOT a AT altman DOT com



Rick A.
 
Do your images have gradients or transparencies? Sometimes those can
cause the bloats when spooling.
 
If I print to file it creates a 250 MB postscript
file, which if I run through distiller for 600 dpi output creates
a 1 MB PDF file. Printing that PDF from Acrobat to the DT6135
sends a 25 MB file to the printer spooler in about 30 seconds.
What's weird is that it then takes 10 minutes to spool to the
DT6135!

The workstation is 2 GHz, plenty of RAM and disk space,
network is 100 Mbps switched. Don't have problems like
this with printing from other Apps.
Click to expand...

I don't think there's anything wrong here, per se.

MS apps make crappy ps files. They're huge. Steve R explained this once or
twice, it has to do with the way MS decided to translate images and
gradients into ps. Basically, they do it poorly.

PDF print spool file size is the key clue...Adobe knows postscript...MS
doesn't. As for the spool time between Acrobat and the printer, I think
that's Xerox's problem.

I do a lot of Word-to-PDF and I've decided that massive ps files are part of
the deal. Get yourself a big HDD, and a fast processor. Move on to things
that can be fixed. :-)

John O
 
Klunk, is the file emailable or FTPable? I wouldn't mind benchmarking
it over here. If so, email me at
Click to expand...

Thanks for the offer -- but it's a customer file,
so I can't.
 
Echo S said:
Do your images have gradients or transparencies? Sometimes those can
cause the bloats when spooling.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the tip and to everyone else that responded
to my posts -- You've helped me find a semi-fix.

We are starting to do a ton of work for one company
that uses their logo down the left 25% of each page. It is
a grayscale bitmap gradient. Deleting it off the master page
cuts the processing time from about 20 minutes down to
less than a minute. But of course they want the logo on there.

So next, I selected the logo on the Slide Master and set
the compression to change the resolution to "Web/Screen"
(96 dpi), since they're printing 2 per page, the image
still prints fine at that resolution. That cut the spool file
down from 1.5 GB to 350 MB, and the processing time to
about 10 minutes. Certainly an improvement.

Of note is that doing a Save As and using the Tools|Compress
option did NOT achieve the same result -- it made no
change to the output. Only by selecting the image then
using Format|Picture... -- Compress... button was the change
reflected in the output size.
 
So next, I selected the logo on the Slide Master and set
the compression to change the resolution to "Web/Screen"
(96 dpi), since they're printing 2 per page, the image
still prints fine at that resolution. That cut the spool file
down from 1.5 GB to 350 MB, and the processing time to
about 10 minutes. Certainly an improvement.
Click to expand...

I suppose the amount of potential improvement depends on whether the logo is
optimized for screen or for print. The screen can tolerate some very small
images, since Ppt anti-aliases every bitmap image. Dragging to size works
pretty well when the output resolution will be 1024 x 768.

As for printing, you might try reducing the size (in pixels) of the logo
until *you* begin to see a difference in the print, and that's probably as
far as you can go...any further and the client will see the diff.

You might also try playing with the image format...does PNG work better than
TIF or whatever it happens to be now?

Sounds like you've got a handle on this.

John O
 
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