InDesign CS3 Bug When Printing Multiple Copies

The more copies you print, the longer it takes to queue. For those printing hundreds of copies, this is a pain.

I recently helped out on InDesignSecrets.com by troubleshooting a new bug in InDesign CS3. It appears that it takes InDesign longer to queue a print job in proportion to how many copies you are printing. If printing one copy takes one second, printing 50 will take 50 seconds, 100 copies will take 100 seconds, and so on. This is not normal behavior compared to previous versions and it’s a potential logjam for those printing hundreds of copies of documents. I think it is affecting only Macintosh users, since it seems it’s the combination of Universal Binary and Intel Macs that is causing it (see the workaround below).

You can see the original story and my results here. Originally I thought it was transparency causing this, since pages with transparent elements blatantly queued multiple times while the others went through fast—but an Adobe tech support person said this was not the case and I’ve since confirmed this.

There is a workaround: quit InDesign and use Get Info (Cmd-I) to “Open using Rosetta”; you will find a checkbox to do this. After launching, you will lose your Open Recent items and revert any saved print settings to default values, but you can print normally.

Dennis White commented on the story and wondered if exporting to PDF and printing in Acrobat would be an easy fix, but I did some testing and concluded in my own comment that it appeared Acrobat 8 Professional also had this printing behavior. I also got the same behavior when I exported a Word document to PDF (using Mac OS X’s built-in function) and printing with Acrobat 8 Professional. One wouldn’t think this is such a large problem, but it may be affecting the recent slate of Adobe Universal Binary products (including Acrobat 8 and CS3). I would have to do a lot more testing to confirm this though.