If you are a cardstock terrain/miniatures enthusiast (whether you make them out of paper, cardstock, or chipboard, does not matter, keep reading), you might experience an issue when you go to print off a high density graphics page of terrain and/or figures, and you request your printer make "X" number of copies through your O/S…
My HP Color Laserjet printer's information screen said that it was processing the file for printing, then it suddenly rebooted! I checked my printer settings on my PC -- everything looked normal. I decided to try it again: this time I got an error message stating my Printer had run out of memory -- it killed the print job on the printer, but my PC said it was "Pending" (Linux Mint O/S)!
I canceled the print job in the PC's Printer Control window.
I have never had any such issue when making color photocopies on my HP Color Laser Printer, so I tried printing just one page, not five… It worked! I took that one printed color page, put it into the document feeder on top of my Printer, and I hit Color Copy, selected five (5) copies of it, and they all printed without any memory failures or reboots!
I compared the original PC printed page beside the "Color Copy" versions, and I noticed the colors had shifted slightly. No problem, as I was printing a stone dungeon floor section (they will be used to cover my Tumbling Towers game pieces, to make 2.5D Dungeon Wall Terrain sections for super-fast dungeon deployment/mapping for miniatures -- see my thread on that topic).
Also of note, is the difference in printing speed: "Processing Print Job…" "Processing Print Job…" "Processing Print Job…" When I print high density graphic images through my PC to my Printer, it churns, sometimes for a minute, processing the graphic image, at every page! It takes a long time for it to spit out multiple copies of a graphics intense page (note that this occurred with Windows 10/11, as well, not just Linux Mint). When I used the Color Photocopy technique, it took a fraction of the time to churn the graphic image, and it printed each successive page without delay. It was considerably faster than printing multiple pages through the PC's O/S!
If you ever run into a RAM Memory failure, or a reboot of your printer, when trying to print multiple pages of a graphics-intensive page (full page art, a page full of figures, 2D/3D building section, etc.), try printing one single copy of it through your PC, then use your Printer's photocopy feature, and tell that feature to make multiple copies for you. If your printer does not have a photocopy function, tell it to print each page individually, then walk away; you might need to send each page print individually, waiting for it to successfully print before you send the next page to your printer's queue.
The photocopy function works differently than the PC print function. Just an FYI in case you run into this issue. Cheers!
makes an addition to his Flash Gordon collection.
