Problems printing large InDesign CS6 files to a PCL printer.

[Justan]

The title covers it fairly well. When printing and using the defaults or when set to scale to fit page, the job, which is a 9,146K file, takes an eternity to finish and then the print dies somewhere in the printer. Tried with 3 different printers and got the same lack of print in all cases.

If the source file is exported to .jpg it will export quickly and then print okay.

Any suggestions?

TIA

[digitaldog]

The title covers it fairly well. When printing and using the defaults or when set to scale to fit page, the job, which is a 9,146K file, takes an eternity to finish and then the print dies somewhere in the printer. Tried with 3 different printers and got the same lack of print in all cases.

What OS? What if you tried a TIFF rather than a JPEG?

[Justan]

Thanks for the quick reply!

The OS is Windows 7 x64, current for updates.

I don’t know if exporting to a tiff is an option but anywho the goal is to simply do a native print from InDesign. Doing this is not a problem for smaller files.

[digitaldog]

Well Windows should print big better than Mac, reason I asked (you might have hit the limit). I suggested TIFF just to see if that would work or not as I wonder if you've hit some memory limitation within ID or something like that.

[Justan]

That is what I’m wondering but can’t find any documents on file size lenitions. The print output is only 11x17 but it’s impossible to get the file to produce any output unless done as an export.

[jerryrock]

The image file type makes no difference. I print large files from InDesign CS6 quite often to PostScript and non Postscript printers (using a MAC). Chances are your InDesign print settings do not match your printer driver settings. The default InDesign settings are Postscript and CMYK.

You can also use preflight feature to check your publication for missing fonts, bad image links or other situations that may cause problems printing.

Until you get a handle on the InDesign print dialog, you may want to export to PDF for printing.

[Justan]

^Thanks, i'll check that.

[artobest]

Forgive me if this is too obvious, but have you checked in InDesign's print dialogue that your printer is selected? InDesign offers options such as printing to a PostScript file - maybe that has been selected by mistake? Again, apologies for suggesting this, as I'm sure you've already checked.