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Printing PDF to network printer

When printing a pdf from the built-in pdf viewer (pdf.js?) to a network printer, it's so slow as to be unusable. Save the same pdf and open it it in Xreader, click print, and it starts printing immediately. Size of the document seems to play a role; I knew it was slow from trying to print smaller documents in the past, but today I needed a hard copy of a 68MB pdf, and hours later, it still had not printed.

I'm running latest Linux Mint Debian Edition 4 Debbie and latest Firefox in its repositories, 78.11.0esr (64-bit). Printer is Canon imageRunner 2200, it doesn't have any other slow printing problems, as I stated above.

Problem seems to have existed for a long time...

When printing a pdf from the built-in pdf viewer (pdf.js?) to a network printer, it's so slow as to be unusable. Save the same pdf and open it it in Xreader, click print, and it starts printing immediately. Size of the document seems to play a role; I knew it was slow from trying to print smaller documents in the past, but today I needed a hard copy of a 68MB pdf, and hours later, it still had not printed. I'm running latest Linux Mint Debian Edition 4 Debbie and latest Firefox in its repositories, 78.11.0esr (64-bit). Printer is Canon imageRunner 2200, it doesn't have any other slow printing problems, as I stated above. Problem seems to have existed for a long time...

All Replies (1)

Firefox's built-in viewer first converts the PDF to an HTML canvas (full page image) with a transparent searchable overlay. For large files, it is progressive and renders only a few pages at a time.

I'm sure a program that can work with PDFs natively will be faster and may send much less data to the printer, even for moderately sized PDFs.