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for some reason i am having trouble printing the .pdf files from this website. i have tried it on multiple printers and networks. i.e. my house and my job. it will print, BUT it only does like 1 page every 5-10 minutes or so. it is EXTREMELY SLOW!! at work if i send the document to the printer i get the first page and then a printer error message. at home it just takes FOREVER!!

Kev and thoughts on this. it is tedious scrolling through the PDF and i don't like putting dirt on the computer when i am working on the car. so paper is better and i can bind it in binders for the shop manuals.

thanks,

Hank

For what it's worth, I don't have any problem printing--either complete documents or just a page or 2 but the files are all on my computer. Maybe the difference? Are you trying to print "live" without downloading?

One thing you have to remember is that these PDF's are scans. Basically a picture of a page. So it's alot of graphic information for both your print driver to process, and your printer to print. So if you are printing a 50 page Owner's Manual, then thats 50 full page images it has to process.

If you take a word document, and print it, you are only printing the text, and the print driver is only processing that small amount of data that the text takes up on the page (not the white space). But on a picture that is the entire size of the page, it has to process every single dot on the page white space or not. So this takes time.

Now some recommendations I can make are this. In your printing driver select B&W only printing. This reduces the processing overhead by 75% versus color printing. Even if the page is B&W, if you dont explicity tell the print driver to only print in B&W, then it will process the entire page as if it is color.

Also some drivers have options for draft or low-quality printing. This was be good if you just need a quick a dirty version.

Personally I keep everything as PDF for computer viewing, and then just print out the pages when I need them for taking into the garage. That way if those pages get greasy, then I can just toss them, as I can reprint them when needed again.

Right clik on the pdf u want. A box will appear and clik on "Save target as...". Follow the directions from there and store the pdf on disk or flash. Flash drive seems to be faster and better for printing. If u're on dial-up then expect it to be slow for loading to flash drive. SLOWER for disk.

***** THEN print the pdf from the flashdrive or disk. ****

Downloading is difficult for me because i use ancient computers and dial-up. But the printing from flash is faitrly fast as long i set print quality "average".

i have a laser printer and so does my job....and the one at job is a high quality HP printer that only does B&W and is designed to print a multitude of pages at a time. it just doesn't like the .pdf docs on this site. it doesn't really matter if i print while viewing from this site or if i print from a download to my desktop.

not to mention if my internet goes out or this site goes down...i will always have my material in paper and archived myself forever here at home.

i am running on 6 meg dsl 1Gig network routing and CAT 6 cabling in the house. the printer is on a print server from linksys as it is a USB printer and for the other computers to share i got the print server.

i know i can't send more than one print job to the queue as the printer freaks out and doesn't print anything.....don't know why...must be memory in the print server or the printer itself.

i guess i just need to be patient with it, that is what i did with the 800 plus other pages i printed from this site ;0) took me about a week ;0) LOL!

I have dumped most of these to the network attached KMBS, Toshiba, OCE, and Canon MFPs (These are the stand alone large printer/copiers found in most mid-sized businesses), and it zips right through them. These large print jobs are probably killing the buffer on the linksys print server.

Going back to what Keith said, the reason that it prints fast from the flash drive is that he is saving the PDFs to the drive and then inserting the drive into the printer, and the printer is printing the PDF natively. So it would be fast. It my experiece writing printer control software for a living, it's the print driver that causes most of the issues. A 1 meg file can turn into a 80meg print stream after being processed by the print driver. Also make sure that on your HP printer you are not selecting 600dpi. All of the content here on the websote was scanned at 300dpi or lower. So if print at 600dpi, all you are getting is a bigger print file, without really any increase in quality.