How to speed up printing PDFs with bitmap fonts

Question

I'm trying to print a PDF paper I downloaded, but my printer spends ages (~2.5min per page) "processing" each page before it rolls out. I share the printer with a number of co-workers who print regularly as well, so I don't want to block it for half a day just printing my paper. Besides, printing really should not need to take that long.

While it looked normal at first, on closer inspection the PDF seems to use a bitmap font rather than vector graphics:

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I suspect this is causing the problems, as other PDFs with normal vector fonts are printed at normal speeds.

I am hoping you can help me speed-up the process. Are there ways to...

• Pre-render this on my machine rather than have the printer do the processing?
• Replace the bitmap font by other font? Finding a perfect match for the bitmap font probably won't be possible, but I'm fine with a less optimal font that prints at normal speeds.

If you have other suggestions for speeding this up, I'd be delighted to hear them!

Answer 1

If the platform is Windows, and the printer is not a Postscript or PCL printer, it is likely that any rendering is being done on the PC anyway.

You can check the fonts present in a PDF file using Adobe's reader (and probably other readers too) - inspect the document properties.

There are products that can replace Fonts in PDF files. Google found "PDFOne" - I have not tried it.