Starting in 1.3, two strategies should help reduce the size of printer spool files, improve printing performance, and even improve print quality:

• Avoid printing with alpha colors. Consider drawing such rendering into an opaque offscreen image and printing that.
• Try to use printer fonts on Solaris and Linux. The logical fonts are safe, as are the standard Postscript font names.

Starting in 1.4.1, you can greatly reduce printer file sizes when printing to black-and-white printers on Solaris and Linux. The trick is to explicitly make sure that everything you send to the printer is some shade of gray (which includes black and white). This takes advantage of better compression for grayscale.

To do this, make sure that all colors and paints use gray only, and that all images are first converted to grayscale. One way of doing this is to redraw an original color image into a grayscale image of the same dimensions, and then send the new grayscale image to the printer.

We cannot automatically do this conversion as then you would be unable to print in color at all. Since Postscript printers are predominantly B&W, you might decide that you can benefit from this tip when you know the nature of the output device. The tip doesn't apply when printing to printers attached to Windows machines because they use GDI -- not our own Postscript generator -- to generate printer files.