From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Thu Oct 27 15:03:13 2011 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id EC757106566B for ; Thu, 27 Oct 2011 15:03:13 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from prvs=0274ed8c24=johnl@iecc.com) Received: from gal.iecc.com (gal.iecc.com [64.57.183.53]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 75CFD8FC1B for ; Thu, 27 Oct 2011 15:03:13 +0000 (UTC) Received: (qmail 47939 invoked from network); 27 Oct 2011 14:36:31 -0000 Received: from leila.iecc.com (64.57.183.34) by mail1.iecc.com with QMQP; 27 Oct 2011 14:36:31 -0000 Date: 27 Oct 2011 14:36:09 -0000 Message-ID: <20111027143609.60335.qmail@joyce.lan> From: "John Levine" To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org In-Reply-To: <15996.1319704110@tristatelogic.com> Organization: X-Headerized: yes Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit Cc: rfg@tristatelogic.com Subject: Re: Fast personal printing _without_ CUPS X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 27 Oct 2011 15:03:14 -0000 I'm not a huge fan of CUPS, but at this point it's the best of a bad lot. I find the queueing useful, since I often print documents long enough that I don't want to wait. >More importantly, CUPS, for me at least, seems to be quite slow. >There's a loooooooong pause after I queue something for printing >until something actually comes out of the printer. Yeah. I have a similar printer with a similar problem. I believe that what's going on is that the current version of CUPS tells all the clients to print to PDF, then for printers that don't handle PDF, converts that to postcript using ghostscript which is very, very slow. I think this is a bug. A few versions ago it used to tell clients to print postscript which it can send directly to my printer. I also looked at using pdftops, which is much faster, to convert the PDF, but the call to ghostscript and the ghostscript command options are wired into the CUPS code and were more hassle to change than I wanted to do. R's, John