Hi All,

I'm having an irritating problem and I can't figure out where it's coming from.

When I try to print a document, say for example the thing I'm working on at the moment - a word file whose on disk size is about 1.5MB, my printer (a networked "HP laserjet 2550 PCL) says it can't print as it's run out of memory... When I look at the printer's document list when I send the file, it's showing a document size of over 100 MB (at the last attempt it was something like 140 MB!) - no wonder the printer is running out of memory!

But what it the source of this problem?! I've tried saving the file as a .doc and printing it from someone else's machine (I'm the only one using office07), I've tried saving it as a pdf and printing it. But I always get this problem!

Anyone seen this before and know how to fix it?!

Thanks in advance for your help!

Paul

It sounds like the printer doesn't have enough memory to print a page. The size of the document has nothing to do with the amount of information that needs to be sent to the document PER PAGE.

This used to be a huge problem on older HP LaserJets, which often ran out of memory, because they had very low levels of memory (< 64KB originally, the LJII had around 512KB?). Throw any decent amounts of graphics, especially high-detail graphics on a page, lots of fonts etc. and you can seriously burn through memory.

Without seeing what 1 page consists of, I can't really help. My current document is 600 pages long, stores at 563KB, but needs several GB of space to print...

How much memory is installed on the printer? What DPI settings are you using? Can you try dropping the DPI down? Reducing the quality of any printed images? What exactly are you printing?

An inkjet uses the PC to rasterise the document and output the data one line at a time (one "print head" line, not necessarily 1 character height line). A laser on the other hand needs to build up the complete image in memory, before it starts to transfer that data to the drum(s) for printing. If you have a lot of complex images, or use a lot of fonts which aren't installed on the printer, then it needs to use a lot of memory to prepare the page. You could look at expanding the memory on the printer.