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Labview printing and system resources

Hello!

I am running dual PII-450 box, with a cheap (NEC superscript 870) laser
printer. Whenever I print the front pannel, task manager shows that 50% of
CPU are used. Is that normal, or that is something Labview is guilty of ?
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> I am running dual PII-450 box, with a cheap (NEC superscript 870) laser
> printer. Whenever I print the front pannel, task manager shows that 50% of
> CPU are used. Is that normal, or that is something Labview is guilty of ?

There are three types of printing supported by LV. The most recently added
is postscript. It is capable of moving more of the processing from the computer
to the printer, but of course requires a postscript printer.

Standard printing opens up a print window and makes the same drawing commands
that it does to the screen. It is then up to the printing and drawing managers
that are part of the OS to render this along with the printer. Where
this occurs
depends on the printer and the drivers. With cheap printers, this rendering
probably
occurs mostly on the computer and large bitmaps are sent to the printer.
Another thing that happens with standard is finding fonts that fit the boxes
and controls that LV is printing to.

The third type of printing is bitmap printing. This is where LV opens a bitmap,
draws into it, and sends the bitmap to the printer. This doesn't use the
print manager much at all until it is time to send out the bitmaps, and this
can take some time depending on the speed of the connection to the
printer and
the size of the printout.

I'd suggest trying each of them out and picking the one that best meets your
needs according to output and the cost. Also keep in mind that you get to
pick whether the printout is black and white or color/grayscale.
Depending on
the type of printing, color can come at quite a cost.

Greg McKaskle
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