In my experience, much slower than Word or WordPerfect files. (I work in an office where I must print a great many of each.)
I’m going to guess you have an older printer, maybe something with 8 MB of RAM?
They don’t. They print exceedingly fast.
That said, it all depends on the size of the file and how it was created. If it was originally a monochrome text file and made into a PDF directly from a word processing app, it should be small and print fast.
If the same file was printed out, then scanned at 600DPI, color, and made into a PDF without any compression, it will be big and print slowly.
When I create PDFs, I set the downsampling of images to 300DPI (most home printers won’t make anything higher much different) and use a medium compresion scheme, at least if I am sending something where graphic quality isn’t paramount. If it is, I don’t down-convert anything.
I sometimes create PDFs to make the printer print faster. Yes, this can be the case, if the original had many hi-res graphics and only a decent draft output is needed. It’s faster to downsample than let the printer or printer driver chew on voluminous data.
PDFs are great, but they are frequently misused or people take the defaults which can be pretty awful.
On this computer, printing PDFs causes the print spooler to make constant System calls, giving the CPU quite a workout and slowing down anything else that might be running. Can’t imagine why this should be. (In fact, the dial-up Internet program we used to use wouldn’t load properly if a PDF was printing.)
Here are two sample files I created and made into PDFs. You’re welcome to download them and print for a test (probably won’t work if this thread is a year old or more):
Winter Dinner Invitation, 8.5 x 11" flyer, some color, limited graphics, 58KB, should print in seconds.
Real Estate Brochure, lots of color and graphics, 2 pages of 8.5x11" each, downsampled to 150DPI with medium compression, 700KB, both pages printed (in B/W, not color) on my 20-year old HP laser driven by an ancient Win98 machine, total processing time on the printer’s end: 1.5 minutes.
Neither of these should cause problems in more modern equipment, yet I think they show how elaborate graphics can be without overloading the printer if the PDF is made right.
How big are the PDF files? Try downloading them first to see the file size, then printing them from your local hard drive.
It also depends on your printer.
A PDF file contains Postscript - Acrobat Reader is a Postscript interpreter that translates PDF Postscript to a display format (in the case of Windows, GDI graphics calls). To print a PDF, those GDI calls get serialised to the printer driver. The printer driver then delivers data to the printer in an appropriate format, based on the printer capabilities.
If the printer is a simple inkjet, the printer driver has to rasterise (render to printer pixels) the output and spool it to the printer (as a large bitmap per page).
If the printer has more complex primitives - lines, curves, shapes etc, then fonts need to be rendered to curves and passed to the printer (a smaller file, but the printer has to have the memory for a full page).
If the printer has a full page description language (HP PCL, Postscript) then the high level GDI calls get a translation and then passed to the printer, which renders the page. Sometimes, there are fonts to pass through, which may need to converted if needed.
It may be possible to pass the PDF postscript directly to the printer, if the driver supports that sort of passthrough. This would require a postscript printer, but would be the fastest.
Si