Efficient Printing

	`This page took 1 minute, 55 seconds to print`
	`This page took over half an hour to print.`

Printing times can vary widely, depending on how your files are set up. Please think twice before you embed a TIFF inside an Illustrator EPS, scale it down, rotate it, crop to just a tiny corner of it, and place it several times in your file.

Just for kicks, I spent an afternoon with a stopwatch and my graphics workstation, to see just what kind of variation I would find. The results are tabulated in this Graph of Print Times.

Tested system:

Image:
7"x7", CMYK, 300 ppi [except as noted]

Output Settings:
Plain Paper, CMYK ink
Full Resolution TIFF output checked
Line Screen of 150 (a manual override of the default setting for Stylus 3000)

System:
Mac OS 8.6
G3 233 MHz
Epson Stylus Color 3000 connected via Appletalk (modem port)

Software:
Quark Xpress 4.04
Epson StylusRIP 3.30
Adobe Photoshop 5.0.2
Adobe Illustrator 8.0.1

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