Microsoft KB Archive/50324

Printing Faster Without Borders PSS ID Number: Q50324 Article last modified on 04-20-1992 PSS database name: W_WinPRoj

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WINDOWS

Summary:

You may experience slowed printing when printing reports or timescales that have borders to dot-matrix or PCL-class printers. To increase printing speed, print without the borders.

More Information:

The printing method by which most dot-matrix and PCL-class printers work is by sending bitmaps to the printer. These bitmaps are a certain number of pixels high (often equal to the number of pins in the printhead) and the width of the page wide. These bitmaps are called bands. Most Windows printer drivers include an optimization whereby the driver first checks to see if a band is empty before downloading it to the printer. If the band is empty, the driver will not send the bits to the printer.

In the case of printed borders, all of the bands contain something. The driver, therefore, needs to download a bitmap for almost the entire page. This amounts to over 8,000,000 bits.

When borders are turned off, much of the page is empty so printing is much faster.

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Copyright Microsoft Corporation 1992.