The Slowest Bitmap Exporting Ever!!!

[jens g.r. benthien]

Luciano,

> Then I removed feathering and set "never smooth
> bitmaps" in options menu, then printing times returned to normal.
> I think this problem is related to the slow
> exporting of bitmaps other users have already
> experienced.

Wrong. It's your system. Or memory. Or hard drive.

When you print, bits and bytes are output to a file, which means written to disk (the SPOOLER). With a slow hard drive, this can take a very, very long time...Don't forget, with the extra information in the feathering and shadows and bevels the printer driver has to 'translate' more information.

If you have plenty of RAM, this process shouldn't be much longer than the export of a bitmap file.

Or the printer driver might not be the best one. Try to get the lastest from the EPSON website, even when the product has been discontinued, this doesn't mean they discontinued to tweak the printer driver.

Seems lots of users really DO have problems with the system configuration - the real trick is not to purchase a system, but to configure it...

Check the access speed of your hard drive first, the read/write speed of a certain file etc. I think the bottleneck on your system is located here.

ciao,
jens g.r. benthien

[Luciano]

I thank you for your quick help, but I have tested an old and trusted xara2 file, added feathering to some objects and printing in xarax went very slow.
I took the same file without feathering and bitmap antialiasing and printing was as fast as usual.
Maybe there are problems in configuration, but it is sure that something happens which slows down the system with these new options enabled during printing. I noticed these problems only in printing since redrawing is as fast as usual.
All the files I tested were originally xara 2 files, I will check if I can find a small file to send as attachment tomorrow.
Thank you again for your suggestions and help.
After, all it's nice to be Xarans ;-)


Luciano

[jens g.r. benthien]

Luciano,

I'll try to keep things simple, so just do following:
01. open your preferred file, remove all bevels, shadows, blends, effects.
02. print it - but not to printer - select your printer and click 'print to file'
03. re-open your prefered file and print it to another file.
04. compare the size of the files - the one of the document with all effects will be considerably larger.

However, you might notice that printing to file is faster than actually printing to your printer.

Reason:
open a 640 x 480 worksheet and type an ' a ' (lowercase) with Times Roman font selected. Make it 200 pixel high and place it in the center of your screen / worksheet. Apply the color 'red' to it, no outline.

OK, look at it. The ' a ' covers a specific area on your worksheet, that means it includes a certain amount of pixels. Let's assume the number of pixels is 100 (of course it's much more, but for better understanding let's take this value).
Now add an outer bevel or shadow. You can produce the shadow as well with XARA 2.0 -> draw a rectangle -> white fill -> no outline -> place it behind the a -> select all -> drag it to the lower right and make a copy -> unselect it -> select the a only -> assign 40% black to it -> right click the white rectangle -> create bitmap copy -> use KPT 3 or another plug-in for a Gaussian blur of 40%
remove the white rectangle behind the original a, move the bitmap to the back and place it behind the a, move it 5 pixels to the right and 5 pixels down.

Now look at your screen / worksheet again. You have the amount of pixels covered by the a = 100 pixels, plus you have the amount of the shadow = 20 or 30 pixels at least. The more feathering you used, the more pixels are covered by the feathering.

Instead of 100 pixels you are dealing with 130 pixels now, which the printer driver has to translate into 'bands' for your printer. Remember, this is just for ONE SINGLE CHARACTER.

Now try to tanslate this pixel increase to your preferred document, count all effects and you can imagine how much more pixels you will end up with when you want to print them.

Something else: to speed up the printer driver, go -> start -> settings -> printers, right click your printer and go to 'properties'.

Go to 'print processor' (or whatever it is called in Win 9X), and select the RAW as default, not EMF or any of the other methods. Hit ok and close the printer box.

Chances are high that EMF had been selected. RAW is a much better method/format to print color.

Perform several test runs. And remember: if you double the resolution on your printer, you actually quadruple the amount of information the printer driver has to process.

I can't go into more details, but there are other important factors for printing fountain fills, non linear shadows etc. It's more math than design or software.

ciao, I hope this helps.

jens g.r. benthien

[jens g.r. benthien]

Luciano,

had some time and made some xperiments.
opened a file in XARA X. Objects with bevels and shadows. -> print to file. Removed the bevels and shadows. -> print to file. Result: 3 seconds faster.

saved this file without XARA X effefcts and re-opened it with XARA 2.0. print to file. Result: printing time 4 seconds longer.

hm, I wish I could help you on this one.

However, there is a nice file size difference as I explained in my last message.

But I noticed something that might be important: if you print your document, the 'Print' windows opens up. Go to -> Options -> Output -> Print As...
If the 'Anti-Aliased-Bitmap' option is selected, printing needs more time. This seems to be the default setting. Change it to 'Normal', go down to 'Fill quality' click the drop down list open, click the up arrow, select 'high' and hit ok. On the next screen hit ok to print. This should speed up your printing.
Read the help file for printing issues and compare 'Normal' vs. 'Anti-Aliased-Bitmap'. Printing with the option Anti-Aliased-Bitmap will take more time.

BTW, I used a Canon color printer driver...

Hope this helps.

jens g.r. benthien

[leetucker1]

Just a small question about the Registry issues Jens raised. Doesn't compressing the Registry slow down access to it? And isn't that worse than having a long boot time, since the Registry gets accessed nearly all the time? And thirdly, how difficult is it to install programs once the Registry has been compressed. I'm definitely interested in cleaning the Registry, but compressing it still seems a little more hassle than it's worth for the disk space. Which one of those two commands was which?

[Luciano]

Jens,
thank you for your help, I paid attention to:
"Options -> Output -> Print As..." as you suggested and now things are working correctly.

Luciano :-)

[jens g.r. benthien]

Lee,

> Doesn't compressing the Registry slow down
> access to it? And isn't that worse than having a
> long boot time, since the Registry gets accessed
> nearly all the time?

Nope. Let's assume the registry does have a size of around 6 megs. In this case the OS needs to read the 6 megs, that means even the 'empty' spaces. If you compress it, the OS has to read only 3.5 or 4 megs, because there are no spaces any more, and which is considerably faster. This applies for booting AND for the normal operation.

> And thirdly, how difficult is it
> to install programs once the Registry has been
> compressed. I'm definitely interested in cleaning
> the Registry, but compressing it still seems a
> little more hassle than it's worth for the disk
> space.

You can install any application you want, because the registry will 'make room' for the entries and grow in size again.

Hassle? Do you think it's hassle to get rid of all the useless pointers to nonexisting dll's etc? A 'lost' dll might turn your system unstable, a condition you certainly don't want, right?!

> Which one of those two commands was which?

scanreg /nop
scanreg /fix

run both, it's safer, just in case Murphy's Law will struck again.

ciao,
jens g.r. benthien

[Klaus Nordby]

Thanks for your tips in this section, Jens!
However, when I ran your undocumented stuff:

scanreg /nop
scanreg /fix

- the "scanreg /nop" didn't DO anything and returned me to the prompt in two seconds. And "scanreg /fix" DID take quite a while. This is the opposite of what you wrote, isn't it? Most importantly: my huge 8.5 Mb registry only got compressed to 8.3 Mb - so what gives? This is on a quite well-behaved Win98 system.

Thanks,

Klaus

PS: "Jens" - are you of Scandinavian origins?

[jens g.r. benthien]

Hej Klaus,

> my huge 8.5 Mb registry only got compressed to
> 8.3 Mb - so what gives? This is on a quite well-
> behaved Win98 system.

You must be one of the few who don't download and install every second NEW freeware tool, kinky games etc - one of the 'serious' users. But believe me, there are many systems out in the offices around this globe, where a the scanreg /nop - after de-installation of useless apps - compresses the registry by 30 to 40%.

And yes and no, I am 50% of Scandinavian origin: my father is from Denmark, my mom from 'Preussen' - I was born in Germany (which translates into being an 'import' in the US), living and working mostly in the US, Germany and Spain if I am not somewhere else on this globe - the very long story cut extremely short ;-/\

Oh, I just noticed that this small piece of information almost discloses my age - I'm a 'silverback' :-))

Med venlig hilsen
With kind regards
Mit besten Gr

[ED]

jens.... I'm sure you're aware of MS RegClean. Does RegClean running in windows do similar operations as scanreg /nop and /fix in Dos? Also, are you familiar with /opt for scanreg?

The BEST is good enough!