Problem with Terminal Server EasyPrint and XPS files

PDFCreator PDFCreator English
1

Good morning,
I have a Terminal Server Windows 2008 with EasyPrint:
this means that, when a client connects to the server, he can print to
its local (redirected) PDFCreator printer.

The problem is that the size of the resulting PDF is too big.

I explain it better…

I have a software that produces various reports, and this software is installed on a Terminal Server.
When
I print a report to a PDFCreator local printer (installed directly on
the Terminal Server), the size is about 25Kb (for a 4-pages PDF).
When I print to a shared printer (i.e. \\myclient\PDFCreator, installed on the TS) the size is about the same.
But when I print to the redirected printer (i.e. “PDFCreator (redirected 5) on TS021”) the size is 6 MB for a 4-pages PDF!

On
an older Terminal Server (Windows 2003), whithout EasyPrint, when I
print to the redirected printer, the size of the resulting PDF is
normal.


The spool size on the local PDFCreator printer on the
Terminal Server is 240 KB, whereas the spool size on the redirected
printer is 32 MB.
The spool file is a PostScript file that, in the redirected version, contains a lot of font definitions.


TS EasyPrint creates an XPS file and transmit it to the client; the client converts the XPS to GDI sending it to the printer.
I
also have been able to “obtain” this XPS file, simply selecting “Print
to file” on the Terminal Server, saving the file as .PRN and renaming it
to .XPS.

But when XPS file is printed with PDFCreator (either
with TS EasyPrint redirection, or opening the XPS file directly on the
client), the resulting size of the PDF is too big.
I tested it with both PDFCreator 1.7.2 and PDFCreator 1.9.2. beta.


If you want to make a test, I can provide a 380 KB .XPS file that produces a 6 MB .PDF file when printed with PDFCreator.
When
I open the PDF file with Adobe Reader, and select “File” ==>
“Properties…” ==> “Fonts”, I see strange font names, like
“00ojf,Bold”, “01fdd,Bold”, and so on (font names changes every time I
print the XPS file).

The same XPS file, if converted to PDF with on-line service (like https://xps2pdf.co.uk/ or http://online2pdf.com/convert-xps-to-pdf), produces a very small PDF, without those strange fonts.

Can you help me?
I
think that, if PDFCreator could generate small PDFs from XPS files
without “garbage”, also printing problems from Terminal Server would
disappear.

Thank you in advance,

   Daniele

2

Hi,


have you tried disabling “embed all fonts” in version 1.7.2? (Options->Formats->PDF->Font)?
If this doesn’t help or is not an option for you, please send us the example file to support@pdfforge.org.

best regards,


3

I tried, but the size is the same (5.871 KB vs 5.761 KB), and I get an error when I open the file with Adobe Reader (font not found).
BTW, I need to print in PDF/A format, and the fonts are embedded by default (final size: 5.877 KB).

I’ll send example files to your address.

   Daniele

4

Hello,

I know this is 3 years old, but did you find any solution for this problem ?

Regards,

Matthieu

5

Hi,

since XPS support was discontinued after PDFCreator 1.7.3, this was never directly adressed.
Using PDFCreator as redirected printer is generally not tested or recommended, please use PDFCreator Terminal Server instead, which should create roughly the same size PDFs as the desktop version on a local machine (when printing from the same applciation and same windows architecture).

Best regards,

Robin