Hello,

   First off, I loved your joke!

   My question is: are you sure it hangs? You see, PDF9** does not provide you with a progress bar, so it can sometimes work in the background for a while, and you won't really realize that it's still going at it until the PDF opens. The progress bar in PDF reDirect hopefully has not hung, but is simply moving more slowly.

   My web site does not convert to PDF very well because it contains one itty bitty picture which is 2 pixels tall and 1 pixel wide, which is repeated over and over again to make it appear as the grey and black lines you see in the header. The PDF will therefore contain thousands of copies of this picture which can make the PDF quite large   and very slow to display.

   In this case, the web site converts much better with the background colors and pictures turned off. Here are my test results (I started counting after the User Interface appeared on the screen, and I only printed page 1 with the Frames Printed "as laid out on the screen"):

TEST #1. Background Pics OFF - My website converted to PDF in 1.5 seconds and the PDF was 97KB.

TEST #2. Background Pics ON - My website converted to PDF in 18 seconds and the PDF was 242KB.

TEST #3. Background Pics ON - Other PDF Product X converted to PDF in 18 seconds.

TEST #4. Background Pics ON - Other PDF Product Y converted to PDF in 17 seconds.

TEST #5. Background Pics ON - Other PDF Product Z converted to PDF in 21 seconds.

   Please let me know if you feel I've gotten it wrong, and PDF reDirect has truly hung. If so, we can try to do some additional testing: there is an error log you can turn on to record additional data if we need to.

   Cheers!

Hello Brian,

   Yes, what you are reporting definitely does not sound correct. However, your comment reminded me of something: I have been using Firefox for the last 6 months, and now that I think about it, I recall experiencing the problem you described when using Internet Explorer.

   So, I attempted just now to print my web site using IE, and sure enough... nothing happened, or so it seemed. Looking at the temporary folder, the amount of data sent by IE was 68 MB (!) of Postscript data. The conversion to the PDF format took 13 minutes on my AMD 1600 computer and the PDF file created was not corrupted, and 58 MB long.

   This result was when I printed with the backgound pictures option turned ON. When switched to OFF, the PDF was created in a few seconds.

   Could you let me know if you are using IE?

   I don't want to pass the blame onto IE, and claim that Firefox is better than IE when converting to the PDF format: sometimes that is true, but I have found that some web sites convert to PDF better when I use IE. However, PDF reDirect Pro is at the mercy of the application that sends the data to the printer: in this case, it seems like IE is having difficulty reacting to the small repeating graphic on my web site, and Firefox handles it better.

   Hopefully this is the source of the problem you are experiencing - and at least you should be able to work around by turning the Print Background Pictures off. If this is not the case, we can go to the next step which will be to turn on the error logging feature.

I'm the Comptroller/IT Manager of our company. The long weekend followed by month end will have me tied up for awhile. I'll revisit this when I have time.