creates very large print spool files (10-20MB) and takes more than 2 minutes to print. Why? Please help, this is killing us. We print over 100 drawings per day. In the print dialog box, I always un-check the print shaded box and check the print 1 to 1 ratio. I tried checking the "draft" box and it printed fast but lines were faint and couldn't see them.
I can second the idea that SolidWorks (and possibly E-drawings) doesn't seem to like the PCL6 printer drivers. We have a Savin print center here and when we upgraded computers in our office, the PCL6 driver got installed. Basic prints were taking an eternity longer than they had before. Reverting to the PCL driver did the trick; everything is running back as quickly and smoothly as it was before.
E drawings certain creates very large print files - they are huge compared to Solidworks native files - which is disappointing. Our measures were 11 times large and the next effect is that the print queue gets blocked because printer download and process is much slower because of the file size.
Our testing shows an 11:1 performance difference - Test by using Solidworks to open using the quickview tick box (no reprocessing of file occurs in quickview) - save as PDF. Open the same file in edrawing and save as pdf - the file will be much larger - for a series of assemblies we found an 11 fold size increase, and no setting in edrawing removed this.
The draft quality does give a smaller file, but sacrifices quality.
It would be really nice if Solidworks used the same print processor for both products - edrawing should be able to print with the same compact file size as Solidworks, but obviously does not do so - Shame because is is otherwise a good product.
The pdf test suggests it is nothing to do with installed printer driver and everything to do with Edrawings.
Please clarify one thing:
You printed to PDF from SW and saved as PDF from eDrawing. Correct?
Yes the test is intended to show that solidworks creates a pdf file that is 11 time smaller than edrawings does. In our opinion, is is the very large file sizes (from edrawings) that create a apparent slow print queue, and relies on the printer being able to accept large print files.
You will see the different in print time if you attempt to print the two pdf files created. My guess is that edrawigns is doing some form of dot matrix printing whilst Solidworks is sending a more compact vector print format, but it is not something I can verify.
OK, so let's be 100% clear on the steps you took.
1. You opened a drawing in SW in Quick View mode and used the Print to PDF to create a PDF file. You did not use the Save to PDF, since there is no Save to PDF command available in Quick View mode.
2. You opened the same drawing (extension slddrw) in eDrawings 2015. You used Print to PDF to create a PDF file.
What PDF Printer driver did you use?
This setting makes a huge difference:
These are my findings:
See attached the files, so you can judge the quality.
of course your draft mode produces a small file - if you can live with the quality good, but we are getting of the track - the key track is printing from edrawings in normal mode is many times slower than printing from solidworks in normal mode - both using the same printer and same printer driver. Your test confirms that edrawings files are l4 times larger than Solidworks creates - hence I think you confirm the effect that printing appears slow from edrawings - probably end of discussion until Solidwork improves edrawing print performance and I hope they do - meanwhile I use solidworks quickview printing for large files but others with edrawings only will have no such option.
There is a simple explanation for the discrepancy. eDrawings uses the tessellation data saved in the SW file. The Image Quality settings saved in the SW file directly impact the PDF quality and processing time. If the IQ is set high, there will be a lot of triangles (in the parts and assemblies) or line segments (in drawings), thus a more intensive computation.
When you print from SW, you benefit from the fact that SOLIDWORKS uses its Parasolid kernel to calculate the ideal geometry.
Would be nice to make eDrawings as powerful as SW, but is usually installed on less powerful machines.
BTW, do you have any drawing views in shaded mode?
Regardless of this long hypothesis, I like your enhancement request. Have you submitted it?
I found the problem. It seems that E-drawings 2015 doesn't like the PCL6 driver versions of the HP printers we are using. I reverted back to the PCL5 drivers and the problem went away. We have three or four different models of HP LaserJet printers and this worked for all models. Go to the HP Support Driver website and download the PCL5 version of the Universal Driver for your HP Printer model and O/S. I hope this helps.