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I
iHeartDaDobe
Participating Frequently
February 26, 2014
Question

"Flattening" takes too long when printing

  • February 26, 2014
  • 1 reply
  • 35032 views

The solutions that I have found seem to involve recreating the PDF.  I am not the author.  Is there anything that can be done to sidestep this flattening?  If possible, without a saving-as to a new file because the original document is part of an email attachment that I want to keep as-is for documentation purposes.  But if I have to save-as, that's better than waiting half the day for the flattening.

Afternote: Saving as small/compressed PDF doesn't help either.  This is frustrating.  PDFs have established themselves as robust read-only documents, but to not be able to print....I long for the simple days.

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1 reply

T
Test Screen Name
Legend
February 27, 2014

If you have a file with transparency, it must be flattened to print. This doesn't normally take that long, unless it is very complicated or the computer very slow. You can use the PDF Optimizer to save as PDF 1.3, which will flatten the transparency in advance. It may make the file enormous, however.

I
iHeartDaDobeAuthor
Participating Frequently
February 28, 2014

Is there a way to paste into the posting entry field for this forum?  I compose my postings using vim, and on this site, I find that I have to manually retype the composition into the posting field because it doesn't seem to be possible to paste into this field.  Ctrl-V doesn't work, and the context menu doesn't have a paste option.

Rather than type everything again, I'll just say that saving as 1.3 got me past the flattening phase, but the printing stalled.  The printer server got jammed up because the print job was perpetually spooling to the queue.  I freed up the queue by cancelling the job.  It is a network printer, but I precluded the network as the cause of this problem by printing from another app to the same printer.

T
Test Screen Name
Legend
February 28, 2014

I think all these symptoms are pointing at files of quite astonishing complexity. Do they take a long time to show on screen (remember, printing is like reading all pages)?

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