iWork Pages (for Mac)

tinyfist

I just got a new Macbook Air, and it is the first Mac I've ever bought. The transition has been pretty jarring at some points, but I'm already loving it. Last night I encountered a bit of a problem where I'm not where to start looking for the solution.

I was making a single page document in the Pages app. It's really easy. It's basically a template with 7 or 8 different photos. You can drop your own photos in there, and that's what I did.

When I went to print 20 copies, it took forever to print, but the speed of the actual printing itself wasn't a problem. Once a page started printing, it was done in under 20 seconds (which I consider pretty good for a full colour document). The problem is that every page (not just the first) took around 5 minutes to get to the printer. So basically it was like:

1. hit print, select 20 copies
2. wait 5 minutes
3. printer starts actually printing and one copy gets printed in reasonable time
4. wait 5 minutes
5. printer starts actually printing and one copy gets printed in reasonable time
6. wait 5 minutes
etc., etc.

It seems like I'm trying to spool a huge job or something. I feel like I'm missing stupidly missing a crucial step somewhere after throwing in my photos and hitting print.

Would anybody be able to point me in the direction of what I'm doing wrong?

edit: for clarity, I'm printing on an HP 1415FNW. Here are the specs:
http://www.shopping.hp.com/product/printer/LaserJet/1/storefronts/CE862A%2523BGJ

tynic

Offhand, the only thing I can think of that might be Pages - rather than a printer issue or a connection problem - is a memory/data sending problem. How big is the file, in kB? How big were the pictures before you dropped them into the document?

I don't think iWork scales down dropped images automatically, even if they're resized on-screen. This is in case you change your mind and want to make them larger again - basically the picture is stored at full size regardless of its 'scaled' appearance. Certainly keynote does things this way - there is an optimization toggle you can use on presentations which will rescale the images permanently to save space, but it's not automatic. There might be something similar you can do with Pages; or you can just scale down the original pics using Preview or similar before dropping them into the document.

(disclaimer: I've used Pages for a long time and never had an issue like this, BUT I pretty much only use it for basic word processing).

EggyToast

You're on a mac, so try printing to PDF. It's in the lower left corner of the Print window, when you go to print something. Save the PDF, and see how big it is. Most likely you're correct in that the images you're sending are ultimately quite big, and your printer has a small amount of RAM.

tinyfist

Thanks guys! The only reason I wasn't totally sure about the image sizes being the cause of the problem is because my printer is supposed to have 160mb of RAM. At least that's what it says in that link I included.

I seem to have fixed the problem, even though I don't understand the solution.

I unchecked the "collate" option. Now every page after the first one comes lickety split! I'm not sure what I'm going to do when I actually need to collate a document at some point though...