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Subject:Re: Word printing problem From:"Dick Margulis " <margulis -at- mail -dot- fiam -dot- net> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Tue, 11 Nov 2003 07:37:01 -0500
"Rob Partridge" <rob -at- holly -dot- com -dot- au> wrote:
>Then I recreated the doc, pasting the text into a new doc and
>reformatting the tables, etc. In doing so, forgot to do the internal
>gridlines. The print time was down to 2mins!
>
>Unfortunately they complained about the missing gridlines, so I added
>them back in. Guess what... print time back up to 30mins. Any ideas why
>adding thin gridlines to a few tables would cause problems?
>
Rob,
This is a print driver issue. The PostScript output from Word, instead of telling the pen to start at one end of a line and draw until it gets to the other end of the line, builds up lines of any length by drawing a series of very short line segments (roughly hyphen-size). I've seen this since the first version of Word that had to generate PS output and apparently it still happens.
I've never tested to find out if it's a Word issue or a Microsoft PS driver issue, but I suspect the latter. If you do not see the same problem when you print the document on your system, then it is definitely the driver. Try sending your customer a PDF instead and see if that resolves the problem. If so, and if the customer still wants a Word document from you, suggest a different printer driver than the one he is using.
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