Foxit -vs- Adobe

Encountered something weird the other day...

A client called me to come and address slow printing issues with two AutoCAD engineers. One engineer uses AutoCAD to make a drawing, and for archival purposes, prints the drawing to PDF. Another engineer needs to print this PDF to add to a reference binder for a presentation. While printing the PDFs to their OfficeJet (networked, 64 MB ram), they noticed that the size of the file ballooned from 2 MB to 250 MB in the queue. Then, ten minutes later, the page would start to print.

I understand that PCL printing will use the computer to decompress and render the file to the printer, versus postscript passing the job to the printer. Some forums suggested using postscript to print PDFs that are slow. But there's no postscript driver for this printer.

Adobe was current - v8 with all patches. On a whim, I decided to install my new favorite pdf reader, Foxit, to see whether there were performance gains.

Interestingly, the file size grew to only 50 MB from the 2 of the original file, and printed much faster. We tested with various files, multiple files being printed together, and other combinations and the performance remained much better than Adobe.

The more you know...