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Printing Problem in our computer lab

We have 12 iMacs in our computer lab at our college. They over five years old but we upgraded to Yosemite and added memory. Our students are having problems trying to print (to a black and white printer) their notebooks. Testing one students notebook (about 6 pages with 3D printing), we had to wait 6 minutes for it to start printing, then it only printed about 4 lines from the notebook and nothing else. At the top of the page are these remarks:

ERROR: limitcheck

OFFENDING COMMAND: image

Has anyone else experienced this? If so, was there a workaround?

We tried saving to a PDF, but we're unsuccessful using that approach as well. Is there a way in Mathematica to compress the size of the notebook before printing that might enable students to print directly from Mathematica. Currently, they are having to screen copy their pages one at a time and then print with the Preview application on the iMacs.

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POSTED BY: David Arnold
5 Replies

I do not have an explanation for why the older iMac is unable to print while the newer one can. The Mathematica FrontEnd process is 32-bit so it cannot directly benefit from the increased RAM. The Kernel process does benefit, but usually it's only involved in printing when the notebook contains Dynamics. In my own testing, the FrontEnd process did not use more than 320 MB, and the Kernel used less than 52 MB while printing your attached notebook. I believe the issue is with the available memory at the printer, and there may also be some timeout related to how long it takes to render the notebook for printing. Reducing the raster size of the output cells solves these problems.

I was able to Save As PDF on my MacBook Pro (circa 2013), but I had to wait a couple of minutes and did observe the spinning beachball.

POSTED BY: Christopher Cole

To create a PDF we tried File->Save As ..., then select PDF Document from the drop down menu.

Here is a bit of more information. My colleague has an office next door to mine. I have an iMac with 16GB of memory in my office, but his is a slightly older iMac with 8GB of memory. When I print the attached file to the printer, it prints quickly and fine. When he tries to print to the same printer, it takes several minutes, but then only prints one page with the ERROR: limit check problem.

POSTED BY: David Arnold
POSTED BY: Christopher Cole

The creation of the pdf failed.

I can report that the changing to bitmap worked. We were able to print, although the image sizes were larger than in the notebook. Our technology support has a lot to work on, as I can print the file from my office machine (a newer iMac with more memory) to the same print machine with no problem. So this bitmap thing is still a workaround.

POSTED BY: David Arnold

If you plan to use this as a workaround, you may find this snippet of code useful:

Module[{nb = EvaluationNotebook[]}, 
 NotebookFind[nb, "Output", All, CellStyle, AutoScroll -> False];
 FrontEndTokenExecute[nb, "SelectionConvert", "Bitmap"]]

Evaluated in the notebook you want to print, it will convert all Output cells to bitmaps. You could also change EvaluationNotebook[] to SelectedNotebook[] and use this procedure as the action of a button in a palette:

CreatePalette[
 Button["Convert Output to Bitmaps", 
  Module[{nb = SelectedNotebook[]}, 
   NotebookFind[nb, "Output", All, CellStyle, AutoScroll -> False];
   FrontEndTokenExecute[nb, "SelectionConvert", "Bitmap"]]]]

Unfortunately, this converts all Output cells to bitmaps even when they are not graphical.

What precisely happens when you try to create a PDF? I assume you are using the Print dialog and selecting PDF -> Save as PDF.... Please let me know if you are doing something different such as using the Save as... dialog.

Thanks.

POSTED BY: Christopher Cole
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