Hello,

This didn't seem to fit in the design or workflow forum as it doesn't feel related to them.

I am having an issue trying to rip PDFs on software called VaryPress PrintServer from a company by the name of Nipson.

I am trying to rip a PDF that has 20,000 pages and it rips quite slow however, if I turn them into Post Script they rip twice as fast. The downside is that I cannot make the Post Script files 20,000 pages as the software errors out. So we have to make them with only 1000 records. That means we have to create ALOT of Post Script files.

I have contacted that company and have yet to hear back from them. I was wondering if you guys at Objectif Lune have heard anything about an issue like this. We use Planet Press Production to create the PDFs. For the Post Script files we use design and select the "All data pages" option, then we use a unix terminal to edit out the records of the Post Script and append our data split into 1000 records each to that Post Script file.

Any help would be most appreciated. Thanks.

Mr. Jones,

It's possible that PDFs will take a long time to RIP, especially if the printer doesn't support native PDF printing. VaryPress basically has to convert the PDF file into postscript, and most likely doesn't support our optimization (caching images at the beginning of the file, and calling them throughout the file).

My question though - why are you not simply printing directly from PlanetPress? Printing in Optimized PostScript Stream directly to the printer (or through VaryPrint) would definitely work.

Other than that... I'm not sure. This basically isn't really a PlanetPress issue, since the PDF Ripping is a printer issue, and since you're modifying the postscript directly before printing, we can't support that.

Regards,
Eric.

I have found out something quite interesting! I contacted someone from Nipson about the Post Script file that failed to rip due to an error. I sent them the file that didn't work and they told me to turn caching off before making a post script file straight from PlanetPress.

It worked!

Now however the file rips on the server software painfully slow. From what I've read in the PlanetPress user guide is that caching handles how memory is allocated for images. I have three different file types inside this document, a jpeg, an eps, and a pdf. Is there a caching option that might speed things up?

Right now I set the server to rip a post script file that has 90 thousand records. I'll find out on Monday if it broke or not and how many records from the time I set it to rip to when they had to shut the machine down for the weekend.

Thanks for any input!

UPDATE:
When I came into work on Monday the VeryPress Print Server ripped 27,500 records out of that 90,000 record file between the time of 11:40am to 10:00pm. At that rate it would have taken nearly a week to rip that many records.

Do you think it might be due to the power of the machine's ability to rip the post script file?

Mr. Jones,

I'm not sure exactly what we can do at this point - you say that it works when you disable caching (so fails when it's on) but ask whether there is a caching option that would make it faster...

The caching methods that we support are Optimized PostScript ("Generic" caching), VPS, VDX, FreeForm and FreeForm2. If the printer supports none of those (which would be odd as the greatest majority of printer should support the Generic caching which is standard postscript), then you're basically stuck using non-optimized, non-cached output, which is and always will be much slower than caching it.

The main reason for this is images. If you have one single image of, say, 20kb in your document, with caching it will be stored once and displayed 90,000 times (so, 20k of job used). If you turn off caching it's sent on every single page, which means 1.8 meg. If you have a 1 meg PDF, well that would be equivalent to 90 gigs.

In essence, if the printer cannot do it, we can't make it do it.

Regards,
Eric.