Very, very sluggish printing

[Craig_Gabriel@adobeforums.com]

InDesign CS and my printer are suddenly having a lot of trouble communicating.

It’s not a fancy printer, just a “Canon BJC-4300 Bubble Jet,” but it works fine with everything else, and worked fine with InDesign until about 24 hours ago. That’s what puzzles me. I’m not using a different printer, different settings, trying to print a different kind of document, etc.—it’s balking at doing seemingly the identical thing it did fine up until yesterday.

When I select a range of pages to print, it used to take five seconds or less to digest that command and start printing. Now it takes several minutes per page. That is, if I ask it to print pp. 200-212, it takes literally more than a half hour before it even starts. The pop-up says “Streaming Page Content” and identifies what page it’s on so far. If I open up the printer, under “Status” it says “Spooling-Printing.” If I use the computer for anything else during this time, it’s very sluggish, like communicating with the printer is taxing everything it’s got.

Then once it finally starts, instead of printing straight through like it normally would, it pauses maybe ten to fifteen seconds between pages.

This is very straightforward text, no graphics or anything complicated.

The printer still works normally with everything else.

[Craig_Gabriel@adobeforums.com]

It only gets worse. Today it took well over five hours to print nineteen pages.

I uninstalled and reinstalled InDesign, for the sixth or seventh time. In the past that's been pretty effective at clearing up problems. (Crashing every time I tried to use the Direct Selection Tool; no longer did that after reinstall. A day or two later it crashes every time I try to use Drop Caps; reinstalled again and ceased doing that. A day or two later, if I deleted, back spaced over, cut, etc. a certain asterisk in my text, it wiped out all text for the remainder of the document. Reinstalled again and it ceased doing that. Etc.)

Now it's the printer thing, and, alas, this time the reinstall had no effect. Oh well.

I want to say it's all happening because of my incompetence with computers, but it's doubtful in that case I'd be having problems only with InDesign. Or maybe I have some virus that messes exclusively with InDesign, and in randomly different ways after each reinstall.

Otherwise this is simply the buggiest software I have ever used in my life. I hate to throw in the towel and switch to some other product, because I've got an awful lot of hours invested into a big InDesign project.

[George_Bilalis@adobeforums.com]

Since things don't happen 'just like that', may I suggest you check over with your installation?
By the way what OS are you using? Can you provide for some more info on your system?

rgrds
George

[Craig_Gabriel@adobeforums.com]

It now takes well over an hour per page (and I can't set it to print more than about 10 pages anyway because it exhausts the 4 GB of space I have available).

I'm using Windows XP.

I also uninstalled the printer itself and reinstalled, with the latest driver from Canon's website.

I've had some help going over my system for viruses and spyware and anything like that, and it certainly appears to be clean.

When you say "check over" the installation, do you mean uninstall and reinstall it from scratch? I was thinking of trying that again because I'm not sure what else to try.

[Jo_Riddle@adobeforums.com]

I know it may sound obvious, but have you tried clearing out your Temp folders? Some hide quite deep, for example, on Win2K, which is what I'm on, the most commonly used Temp folder is in C:\Documents and Settings\Yourname\Local Settings\Temp. These fill up particularly fast if you use Illustrator as well.

I've just cleared 23MB out of mine!

HTH

Jo

[Craig_Gabriel@adobeforums.com]

I looked around and then ran a search to see if there might be any more TEMP files, but I didn't turn up any. The ones I already knew about I made sure to empty out again.

I just uninstalled and reinstalled InDesign yet again. Tried to print and it's exactly the same.

I might be able to borrow a different printer and hook that up to my computer to see if InDesign works with that. At least that might be a step toward finding where the problem lies.

Since the printer works fine with everything else, I would think the problem is with InDesign, but who knows.

[Craig_Gabriel@adobeforums.com]

Nope. Hooked up a different printer to my computer. It works with everything except InDesign. I'm stuck.

[Alan_Gold@adobeforums.com]

If it used to print okay, I would try trashing the InDesign preferences and SavedData files, as described in archived threads here.

They can become corrupt, and I'm not sure that a simple uninstall/reinstall will get rid of them unless you delete them specifically.

AG

[Craig_Gabriel@adobeforums.com]

According to InDesign Help, opening InDesign and holding down shift, control, and alt simultaneously is supposed to open a dialogue box where you can delete preferences, but when I hold them down, nothing happens.

However, I was able to find the two files InDesign Preferences and InDesign SavedData under "Applications" and I deleted them manually.

I rebooted my computer and reopened InDesign. No change. InDesign still balks at the very notion of communicating with my printer.