Raster Printing Problems in 2012

[JCorum939444]

After our office had a server upgrade, we all noticed an incredibly increased amount of time it takes to print any drawing that has a raster image. Some drawings would take upwards of ten minutes to print! Publishing multiple drawings then becomes an impossibility, unless someone is willing to wait all day to get their prints.

These are not very complicated drawings; each only have a single raster image (if any), with no more than ten layers at the most (two at the least), nothing larger than D-sized. We mainly print to either of two HP Laserjet M5035. When printing to the plotter (Canon iPF600), we don't seem to experience any sort of delays -- except for the cases where the drawing is sent to the plotter's queue, only to disappear, unprinted, seconds later.

I've gone back and forth with our AutoCAD rep, as well as our IT group and the Autodesk Support Team. Nobody has come up with anything that actually solves the problem. The printer drivers are all up-to-date and we also upgraded our router to something beefier. I've since changed the raster/OLE quality settings on all the plot files with no result.

We do an awful lot of printing in the office and aren't primed to change policy anytime soon. Unfortunately, production reaches a stand-still while we await prints. I've been able to hold off the pitchforks by having people batch plot in small groupings but it's still an unacceptable change.

UPDATE

The IT group updated our printer driver to PCL 6. Unfortunately, none of our problems were solved. Initial testing was promising but it turned out to be a dead end.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. I'm starting to think there may have been a problem with the actual Raster deployment. We were running a mixed enviroment for a time (Autocad 2010 and 2012, XP and Win 7, x32 and x64). New information from users suggest that there were problems printing from Raster during this inbetween period, making it that much harder to pinpoint the cause.

Would completely reinstalling Raster be too laborious to consider? At this point, I'm grasping.

[Jmurphy]

If itv worked before the server started to go out and now it doesn't with a new server I would say it's the server and network. If you uninstall raster design on one workstation and try to print what happens. (Raster Design is not needed to use a raster in AutoCAD) Did you rename the server with the same name as the old server? What about creating a new pc3 file for the plotter and testing. Also I supect the AutoCAD support tech already checked and made sure the support paths in AutoCAd are updated as well pointing to the new server.

[moshira_hassan]

this may help

http://forums.augi.com/showthread.ph...-to-OCE-TDS400