General Discussion - Printing and webpages

Author

Printing and webpages

tech4

2001-05-07, 4:20 pm

When you print an [online] webpage is it printed from the browser cache or is it pulled directly from the originating url?

tech4

2001-05-07, 11:09 pm

The cache is disabled.

If you view a print preview, you can see the page building from the urls.

Here's more on this:

We have a printer directly connected to a server. When a web page is sent to this printer from the network it takes forever to print.

The same printer will print the same page instantly if it is directly connected to the PC/workstation on LPT1.

ccieToBe

2001-05-08, 6:56 pm

This is a function of the browser, so it could vary. With IE, Netscape and Mozilla I think the page would be pulled from the cache. I say this because on a dial up connection I've printed large documents too quickly for the PC to have requested the document over again.

I can think of a few different posible causes for the delay in printing over the network:

1. When you print to a directly attached printer, the print job is sent to the printer almost immediately. With a networked printer, it first goes to the printer's que and sits there until the que is checked. For some reason, the que might not be checked very often.

2. I'm assuming that the cable used to connect the printer to the PC is the same in both cases. If not this may be the problem. Another posibility along these lines is that the port to which the printer attaches operates at a slower speed on the server then it does on the PC.

3. If you're on an overutilized network and/or the print job is very large this would be a cause for delay.

4. I'm also assuming that you're using the same driver in both situations. If the local driver's PCL based and the network driver's PostScript based this would explain the speed difference.

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