Name: skT88420 Date: 09/14/99


While we're still celebrating that opaque drawImage calls no longer cause the whole page to be rasterized when printing, we're still finding that PostScript files produced are very verbose. In particular, text is rendered as PostScript paths rather than "show" calls which cause our printed maps to produce large files. We're printing on paper sizes such as A2, so we need printing performance to be as good as possible - and not to fill up our user's disks!

I was informed that switching to a physical font such as "Arial" might prevent text being rendered as paths, but this made no difference to me.

What I would really like is for there to be enough rendering hints available to allow fast but less accurate printing. I don't care about printed images being identical to screen images for my purposes - I just need both to be a good representation of the maps I'm displaying. For example, we just need to see dashed lines for drawing gas mains - the exact dash shapes are of no real importance as long as they match the legend. At the moment, we've fallen back on generating PostScript directly and can produce *much* leaner PS files than Java2D can. However, this is a hack and we have to rely on users to know that they have a PS printer and invoke the appropriate command. In addition, it doesn't help for printers which are using HPGL or PCL (our clients use a lot of big pen plotters and other weird devices).

Printing performance is the number one big issue with our clients at the moment so we're really keen to see if 1.3 helps. So far, it's looking good, but we really need to get leaner print files.
(Review ID: 95222)
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