Terminal Service Client and Local Printer document size

rbuser

A customer running our app via a Terminal Server and RDP client, when
printing to a local printer is experiencing very large document sizes
(50Mb) being spooled, but if the same report is printed directly without
an RDP connection, the document size is only about 6Mb. If all graphic
components are removed from the report (lines, shapes, Images etc) the
RDP printed report drops back to a respectable 1Mb. So this seems to be
a TS/RDP issue with how graphics are rendered, but do the team have any
ideas of how to resolve? We are only at the beta testing stage with this
app at the moment, but we will need to come up with a solution before we
go live.

TIA, Paul

nardmoseley

Google on 'Terminal Services large print spool file size' or 'Easy Print
large print spool file size'.

This issue has come up before, but I don't know the solution, we don't have
experience with Terminal Services here. Perhaps MS has some updates
available that resolve the issue or perhaps there is a way to configure TS
to resolve the issue.

ReportBuilder uses standard Win API commands to draw to the printer canvas -
MoveTo/LineTo, TextOut, etc. This is not an RB issue.


-
Nard Moseley
Digital Metaphors
www.digital-metaphors.com

rbuser

On 08/08/2013 15:41, Nard Moseley (Digital Metaphors) wrote:

Thanks for the reply Nard. We've done some more tests using the demo app
that comes with "Learning Report Builder" and it does seem to us that RB
"is" playing some part in the large spool size scenario. I've listed the
what we've done and the results below, but can I say in advance that
we've been working on a major upgrade to our app for almost 5 years now
and its currently in beta; loads of our customers use TS so we just have
to nail this otherwise we are going to be in big trouble. We're still on
RB 14.08 because we've parked our RB code for the time being, but we'll
be upgrading to 15.x before we release (or any time soon, if we have to).

Report: "Simple table" from Learning Edition

Spool size using TS: 180 Mb
Spool size using local machine : 108 Kb (note kilobytes)

Remove the 3 line components from report:

Spool size using TS: 1 Mb
Spool size using local machine : 65 Kb

We then decided to take RB out of picture completely so we made a new
report (via your demo app) with 1 label and 1 line component in details
section. It runs to 8 pages in RB and we exported it to HTML. We then
printed from the TS using RB and then opened the HTML output in Internet
Explorer and printed from there:

Spool Size from RB: 10 Mb
Spool Size from IE: 1 Mb

I'm nt expert on remote desktop streaming but I'd have thought the issue
here would be more to do with the RDP aspect of using TS than the other
stuff that a TS does (Windows sessions etc). But like yourselves, we
don't know where to start, so can we not work with each other on this to
get this one beaten?

Paul

rbuser

OK, time to grovel a back-track: you are completely correct Nard, its an
Easy Print issue. You need to i) turn it off, and then ii) install the
printer drivers for the remote printer on the Terminal Server, since
Easy Print is no longer there to manage the printing process. We found
this article useful for how to turn Easy Print off:
http://spottedmahn.wordpress.com/2011/06/01/cant-print-over-rdp/

Once Easy Print was turned off, for the printer we were testing with,
selecting PCL5 resulted in a 330kb spool, whereas selecting PostScript
generated a 3Mb file (still better than 180Mb). Hopefully, other users
may find this all helpful.

Paul

nardmoseley

Paul,

Thanks for posting the follow up, we can share it with others.

I found a couple of decent links to articles that discuss TS Printing
configuration options and Easy Print. Sounds like printing has been a huge
challenge for TS for a long time.

1. Ultimate Guide to Terminal Server Printing - Design and Configuration
(from 2004, but probably worth reading)

http://www.brianmadden.com/blogs/brianmadden/archive/2004/02/02/the-ultimate-guide-to-terminal-server-printing-design-and-configuration.aspx

2. Introducing Terminal Services Easy Print (Parts 1, 2, 3)

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/rds/archive/2007/04/26/introducing-terminal-services-easy-print-part-1.aspx


-
Nard Moseley
Digital Metaphors
www.digital-metaphors.com