[Jazz]

There is a school of thought out there suggesting that background printing is
not such a good idea - can anyone give me more detailed info on what exactly
this option does? Do any of the MVPs out there think it is better to have
this option selected or deselected. Is it more bother than it is worth?

http://www.pptfaq.com/FAQ00034.htm -- indicates that in PPT at least, this
option should be deselected. Could it be the same for Word? please advise.

Thanks for your time.

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I leave it on and don't ordinarily have any problem with it. Whenever there
is a printing problem, however, one of the first troubleshooting techniques
is to disable it and see if that helps. Sometimes it is also necessary to
turn off print spooling in the printer Properties and print direct to the
printer, which is a major PITA but the only way to solve certain problems.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.

"Jazz" wrote in message
...
There is a school of thought out there suggesting that background printing
is
not such a good idea - can anyone give me more detailed info on what
exactly
this option does? Do any of the MVPs out there think it is better to have
this option selected or deselected. Is it more bother than it is worth?

http://www.pptfaq.com/FAQ00034.htm -- indicates that in PPT at least, this
option should be deselected. Could it be the same for Word? please
advise.

Thanks for your time.

[Jay Freedman]

Exactly what the background printing option does: It causes the output of
the print command to be stored in a "spooler" file on disk. Once the entire
document (or selected part of it) has been sent to the spooler file, you get
back control of the program and can continue to edit. Meanwhile, a separate
program (part of Windows) takes care of sending the data from the spooler
file to the printer at whatever speed it can handle.

If background printing is turned off, then the program (Word, PPT, etc.) is
completely responsible for sending data to the printer, and you may have to
wait until it's finished before you can resume editing. Of course, this will
be more noticeable in a very large document than if you print only a few
pages.

This used to be a much bigger deal about 10 years ago, when the typical
printer was a 50 character-per-second dot matrix with no buffer, connected
to a parallel or serial port. Recent laser and inkjet printers are much
faster, have their own buffer memory, and are typically connected to a
high-speed USB port. That's why the page you quoted says "PowerPoint returns
control to you a little more quickly when Background Printing is turned
on" -- it used to be "a lot more quickly" but things have changed.

I have more quibble with the insinuation that "you'll avoid being bitten by
some of the bugs that live on it". A few printer drivers have bugs that show
up when they're spooled, but that isn't the spooler's fault. If you don't
have one of those drivers, there's no reason to avoid background printing.
There just isn't as much reason to use it as there used to be.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.


Jazz wrote:
There is a school of thought out there suggesting that background
printing is not such a good idea - can anyone give me more detailed
info on what exactly this option does? Do any of the MVPs out there
think it is better to have this option selected or deselected. Is it
more bother than it is worth?

http://www.pptfaq.com/FAQ00034.htm -- indicates that in PPT at least,
this option should be deselected. Could it be the same for Word?
please advise.

Thanks for your time.

[Jazz]

Thank you for taking the time for that explanation.

I'll tell you why I asked:

I work for a law firm where all printers are configured to use the driver HP
LaserJet 8100 Series PCL 5e. We have (for months) experienced each line of
text in a document "squishing" (technical term) into the first character's
space on each line as though each letter in that line were on top of one
another. This only happens to the said documents whenever the print command
has been issued. This doesn't happen each time to each document, and we are
unable to reproduce this action, though it has occurred too many times in too
many documents to be accidental or fluke.

Using Word 2003 SP1 on WinXP


Ever seen this before? I have been able to correct this sometimes by
turning off the background printing. Sometimes, restarting the print spooler
in windows will do the trick. But neither solution is consistent.
"Jay Freedman" wrote:

Exactly what the background printing option does: It causes the output of
the print command to be stored in a "spooler" file on disk. Once the entire
document (or selected part of it) has been sent to the spooler file, you get
back control of the program and can continue to edit. Meanwhile, a separate
program (part of Windows) takes care of sending the data from the spooler
file to the printer at whatever speed it can handle.

If background printing is turned off, then the program (Word, PPT, etc.) is
completely responsible for sending data to the printer, and you may have to
wait until it's finished before you can resume editing. Of course, this will
be more noticeable in a very large document than if you print only a few
pages.

This used to be a much bigger deal about 10 years ago, when the typical
printer was a 50 character-per-second dot matrix with no buffer, connected
to a parallel or serial port. Recent laser and inkjet printers are much
faster, have their own buffer memory, and are typically connected to a
high-speed USB port. That's why the page you quoted says "PowerPoint returns
control to you a little more quickly when Background Printing is turned
on" -- it used to be "a lot more quickly" but things have changed.

I have more quibble with the insinuation that "you'll avoid being bitten by
some of the bugs that live on it". A few printer drivers have bugs that show
up when they're spooled, but that isn't the spooler's fault. If you don't
have one of those drivers, there's no reason to avoid background printing.
There just isn't as much reason to use it as there used to be.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.


Jazz wrote:
There is a school of thought out there suggesting that background
printing is not such a good idea - can anyone give me more detailed
info on what exactly this option does? Do any of the MVPs out there
think it is better to have this option selected or deselected. Is it
more bother than it is worth?

http://www.pptfaq.com/FAQ00034.htm -- indicates that in PPT at least,
this option should be deselected. Could it be the same for Word?
please advise.

Thanks for your time.

[Jay Freedman]

There have been several reports of that problem. Probably the most detailed
thread is at
http://groups.google.com/group/micro...4b82cfda714e95.
Turning off print spooling is cited as one possible solution, but it seems
to work for some people and not others. There are a lot of other possible
factors.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.


Jazz wrote:
Thank you for taking the time for that explanation.

I'll tell you why I asked:

I work for a law firm where all printers are configured to use the
driver HP LaserJet 8100 Series PCL 5e. We have (for months)
experienced each line of text in a document "squishing" (technical
term) into the first character's space on each line as though each
letter in that line were on top of one another. This only happens to
the said documents whenever the print command has been issued. This
doesn't happen each time to each document, and we are unable to
reproduce this action, though it has occurred too many times in too
many documents to be accidental or fluke.

Using Word 2003 SP1 on WinXP


Ever seen this before? I have been able to correct this sometimes by
turning off the background printing. Sometimes, restarting the print
spooler in windows will do the trick. But neither solution is
consistent. "Jay Freedman" wrote:

Exactly what the background printing option does: It causes the
output of the print command to be stored in a "spooler" file on
disk. Once the entire document (or selected part of it) has been
sent to the spooler file, you get back control of the program and
can continue to edit. Meanwhile, a separate program (part of
Windows) takes care of sending the data from the spooler file to the
printer at whatever speed it can handle.

If background printing is turned off, then the program (Word, PPT,
etc.) is completely responsible for sending data to the printer, and
you may have to wait until it's finished before you can resume
editing. Of course, this will be more noticeable in a very large
document than if you print only a few pages.

This used to be a much bigger deal about 10 years ago, when the
typical printer was a 50 character-per-second dot matrix with no
buffer, connected to a parallel or serial port. Recent laser and
inkjet printers are much faster, have their own buffer memory, and
are typically connected to a high-speed USB port. That's why the
page you quoted says "PowerPoint returns control to you a little
more quickly when Background Printing is turned
on" -- it used to be "a lot more quickly" but things have changed.

I have more quibble with the insinuation that "you'll avoid being
bitten by some of the bugs that live on it". A few printer drivers
have bugs that show up when they're spooled, but that isn't the
spooler's fault. If you don't have one of those drivers, there's no
reason to avoid background printing. There just isn't as much reason
to use it as there used to be.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the
newsgroup so all may benefit.


Jazz wrote:
There is a school of thought out there suggesting that background
printing is not such a good idea - can anyone give me more detailed
info on what exactly this option does? Do any of the MVPs out there
think it is better to have this option selected or deselected. Is
it more bother than it is worth?

http://www.pptfaq.com/FAQ00034.htm -- indicates that in PPT at
least, this option should be deselected. Could it be the same for
Word? please advise.

Thanks for your time.

[Jazz]

Thank you again! I found a link on that posting
http://www.brianstevenson.com/blog/?p=136 which pretty much confirmed that
disableing the background printing has proven successful for others. I can't
tell you how much I appreciate your help!

"Jay Freedman" wrote:

There have been several reports of that problem. Probably the most detailed
thread is at
http://groups.google.com/group/micro...4b82cfda714e95.
Turning off print spooling is cited as one possible solution, but it seems
to work for some people and not others. There are a lot of other possible
factors.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.


Jazz wrote:
Thank you for taking the time for that explanation.

I'll tell you why I asked:

I work for a law firm where all printers are configured to use the
driver HP LaserJet 8100 Series PCL 5e. We have (for months)
experienced each line of text in a document "squishing" (technical
term) into the first character's space on each line as though each
letter in that line were on top of one another. This only happens to
the said documents whenever the print command has been issued. This
doesn't happen each time to each document, and we are unable to
reproduce this action, though it has occurred too many times in too
many documents to be accidental or fluke.

Using Word 2003 SP1 on WinXP


Ever seen this before? I have been able to correct this sometimes by
turning off the background printing. Sometimes, restarting the print
spooler in windows will do the trick. But neither solution is
consistent. "Jay Freedman" wrote:

Exactly what the background printing option does: It causes the
output of the print command to be stored in a "spooler" file on
disk. Once the entire document (or selected part of it) has been
sent to the spooler file, you get back control of the program and
can continue to edit. Meanwhile, a separate program (part of
Windows) takes care of sending the data from the spooler file to the
printer at whatever speed it can handle.

If background printing is turned off, then the program (Word, PPT,
etc.) is completely responsible for sending data to the printer, and
you may have to wait until it's finished before you can resume
editing. Of course, this will be more noticeable in a very large
document than if you print only a few pages.

This used to be a much bigger deal about 10 years ago, when the
typical printer was a 50 character-per-second dot matrix with no
buffer, connected to a parallel or serial port. Recent laser and
inkjet printers are much faster, have their own buffer memory, and
are typically connected to a high-speed USB port. That's why the
page you quoted says "PowerPoint returns control to you a little
more quickly when Background Printing is turned
on" -- it used to be "a lot more quickly" but things have changed.

I have more quibble with the insinuation that "you'll avoid being
bitten by some of the bugs that live on it". A few printer drivers
have bugs that show up when they're spooled, but that isn't the
spooler's fault. If you don't have one of those drivers, there's no
reason to avoid background printing. There just isn't as much reason
to use it as there used to be.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the
newsgroup so all may benefit.


Jazz wrote:
There is a school of thought out there suggesting that background
printing is not such a good idea - can anyone give me more detailed
info on what exactly this option does? Do any of the MVPs out there
think it is better to have this option selected or deselected. Is
it more bother than it is worth?

http://www.pptfaq.com/FAQ00034.htm -- indicates that in PPT at
least, this option should be deselected. Could it be the same for
Word? please advise.

Thanks for your time.