3.3.2 slow print bug?

Hi. I've just updated from 3.2.2 to 3.3.2. And it's super slow to print. About 5x slower than before. One for the devs, I assume. Regards, David

Hi David,

both versions use the same print driver, did you print the same (or very similar) documents from the same application on the same machine? All those are factors which can potentially influence the speed of the printing.
Are you sure it is the printing, or does it just take longer for the application to launch after sending something to the PDFCreator printer (does it also take as long if you already have PDFCreator running)?

Best regards

Robin

Hi Robin,

Thank you for your reply there, much appreciated. It's the same document from the same application on the same machine. The slow part now is when PDFCreator is displaying Converting.., with the rotating dot pattern, and the % complete figure under. That % complete now increases around 5x slower than before. That's true whether or not I already have underway, a print to PDFCreator. Hope the info helps. If there's anything you'd like me to try, just say..

Best regards,

David

Hi David,

thanks for the additional information; the part where PDFCreator displays the "converting .." progress bar is the actual conversion (printing/spooling is already completed at that point).
It might take a while to properly test/reproduce this here, which will be the first steps towards finding a solution.
Does the document you print contain large or many images?

Best regards

Robin

Hi Robin,

Many thanks for your reply. The document does contain quite a few images. It is a 129 page Word document, that has 119 images, of varying sizes. A few are little symbol images, that are repeated maybe 100 times each.

But the same 5x slowdown is seen with other documents, some small, some large.

One document is an Excel spreadsheet, with no images, but quite a lot of tabs.

Hope helps,

Best regards,

David

PS If helps, I could try reverting to 3.2.2, and see if things speed back up

Hi David,

I will run some tests here, try to reproduce the issue and let you know what I find out or if there is anything you can do to help.

Best regards

Robin

I wasn't able to reproduce the issue here with a 100 page document containing mainly images, it even was slightly faster with the new version. Please do revert to 3.2.2 to see if it speeds things back up for you.
Did you use the free edition in both cases and did you change any PDFCreator settings after updating?

Hi Robin,

Oh, pity you're not seeing the issue. Sure, I'll try a revert to 3.2.2.
Yes, it was the free edition in both cases. And no change to any PDFCreator settings.
Just I upgraded from 3.2.2 to 3.3.2 per PDFCreator prompting, and the slowdown occurred straight after :-/

Actually, it just occurred to me, during the install, it said I need to reboot to complete the install.
But I urgently needed to do a print to PDF, before I could reboot. So I tried a print to PDF, and it worked.
I was kind of surprised, as the installation still required the reboot. Anyways, it was that print, when I first saw the 5x slowdown. Was it that print before reboot, that might have caused the problem to occur, perhaps ?

Best regards,

David

Hi David,

the reboot is only required to replace the shell extension, it shouldn't have any impact on the performance.
it could potentially of course be something unrelated to PDFCreator slowing down your system in general, in which case 3.2.2 would also be as slow.

Best regards

Robin

I've noticed the same problem -- extremely slow processing with 3.3.2 with Windows 10.

My output is text only and a single file, printing from a notepad style editor.
The resultant PDF is approx 240 A4 pages.
So not that big.

Previously I'd been using version 2.2.2 on a Windows XP machine which is lightning fast in comparison.
I've only recently moved this facility to Windows 10, so I can't make comparisons with earlier Windows 10 installations.

Is there any update on the status in the past month or so?

Regards

Eamonn

Hi,

we use the Postscript drivers provided by the OS and it has been like this for a long time.
I doubt there is anything we can do about this on our end in the nearer future.
Have you tried printing from a different application?
If you'd like to try if it makes any difference, we could send you a PDFCreator 2.2.2 setup.
There were some small changes to our print monitor though (each PDFCreator can now use an individual port), but this should only make a difference if you process jobs on multiple PDFCreator printers simultaneously.

Best regards

Robin

I rewound to version 2.2.2 and now it's working as I expected. Presumably this is using the same drivers as 3.3.2., so where does the difference lie? Why does 2.2.2 outperform 3.3.2 so drastically?

Secondly, as I mentioned in a new thread that hasn't been answered yet (PDFcreator strange output file size differences ), the file created by 3.3.2 is 2.6 times bigger than the file created by 2.2.2. Why?

Regards

Eamonn

I made a test with both versions on virtual machines and wasn't really able to detect a difference in performance. I didn't use huge files, though.
Since we need to handle other requests as well, tests like these may take some time. If you still have your test files, feel free to send them over via our contact form or direct message. You can also export your PDFCreator settings (Application settings -> Debug) and attach these too.
Of course, we'll also address the mentioned output size differences as soon as possible.

By the way, many thanks for your feedback!

I'm having this exact problem.

Can someone tell me where I can download a previous version of PDFCreator please?

Thanks

You can find older versions on our download website: https://download.pdfforge.org/

Before you install a new version, kindly make sure that your Windows has all the current updates and see if that fixes the issue.