Large PDFs take forever to print at copier

[HudonM]

Hello Adobe Community,

We have been experiencing issues with some users printing PDFs, especially large ones. We have Ricoh copiers, and when a large PDF is sent to the copier, it often takes hours (if not longer) to process in the copier and be ready to print. The PDFs that most often have major issues are large sheets of music. These music pages include music notes primarily, and not just text. For instance, one PDF of music is 153 pages, and, when sent to the printer, is 117 MB. However, even smaller prints of music (around 80 pages/30 MB) struggle to print out.

What makes things worse is that when the copiers are processing the print job, it often causes all other print jobs to be unable to print. That, combined with the incredibly long time it takes to print the job, makes it so nobody else can use the copier for hours on end.

The person printing these sheets of music will continue to need to print, so I was hoping to figure out what is going wrong when they send these large PDFs to the copier, and what can be done to drastically speed up the print time. I am not sure if the issue is with the size of the PDFs themselves, or with the drivers. I have the appropriate drivers installed for the copier, yet it still takes quite a long time to print. Text documents, like Microsoft Word documents, print without issue, even large documents. Other users who print large PDFs usually do not have this issue, as their documents are mostly text based, with a few images and other symbols scattered throughout. While their jobs may take longer than others to print, they usually do not take hours (unlike the sheet music).

Any ideas of what to check/try as a fix would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you!

[Abambo · Accepted solution]

Music sheets are documents like any other document, so per se, they should not take more or less time to print. It would be interesting to see one page of that music sheet document.

Is that user using “Print as image”? If they are using print as image, it would be worth switching that option off. If they don't do use that option, it would be worth switching that option on. With print as image, Acrobat takes over the task of ripping the file and sends an image only to the printer.