Very slow printing to default Adobe PDF printer

And now the problem has really hit home. I have nine different multilingual manuals, with native speakers sending me their corrections. After each set of corrections are applied I need to reprint the manual and make it available for further checking. It has just taken 18 MINUTES to print a 100 page manual to the Adobe PDF printer - and that's just one manual, following one pass of corrections.

**** ADOBE: FRAMEMAKER'S PRINTING PROBLEMS ARE HAVING A DISASTROUS AFFECT ON MY WORKFLOW! ***

ddsbleton: I have tried all the recommendations, but none have any effect.

I recently 'upgraded' to TS3. After first uninstalling TS2, I then followed a detailed list of Adobe instructions about how to eradicate all traces of Acrobat left behind by the uninstaller. I then performed a fresh install of TS3 (from the DVD). The printing problem from FrameMaker (incorporating Link By Reference'd AI Illustrator files) to Acrobat has not improved at all, so for me output to Acrobat PDF remains terrible.

As a technical writer I have bought all of Adobe's latest programs, but I must not expect them to work together properly. I am expected to waste time producing an intermediate format for all of my illustrations, because FrameMaker doesn't understand Adobe's own flagship drawing program. And that's clearly not the only problem, as has been highlighted by so many people on this thread.

Ian, would you re-post your O/S info, and whether you're on a 64-bit system and/or in a VM?

Sheila

Derek,

Thanks for replying. The thread you mentioned was one of the many I tried, but none of the suggestions worked. It seems the only solution you found was to install a very old driver, is that correct? I don't want to do that when every other program on my PC, Adobe or not, can print perfectly fast to the default, uncustomized Adobe PDF printer.

That points the blame at FrameMaker, or perhaps using linked Illustrator files within FrameMaker. The reason I say this is because when printing, the little FrameMaker print output window clearly shows the process is slowing on the graphics-heavy pages. I'd expect that a bit with any program, but should sending a single page with a little 1.2 MB linked AI file really lock up a 3.0GHz PC for 25 seconds?

Some further tests are necessary. I'll have to waste some time taking one chapter from my book and replacing all the linked AI files with linked SVGs to see if the problem is Illustrator based. If that doesn't work, I'll try TIFs or JPGs...

EDIT:  Since writing the above I have tried using a CS3 Illustrator file, an SVG and a TIFF. The CS3 file and the SVG still took 20 seconds to print a single page, but using a TIFF instead caused the page to print almost instantaneously!  How can it be that using a vector based file can cause printing to Adobe PDF to be about 20x slower than using a TIF file?

EDIT: Using FrameMaker's Save As PDF... menu option to write the complete book takes around 4m 30s, an improvement over the 7 minutes printing it to the Adobe PDF printer, but still far too slow.