Q: When I print a page with no watermark, it prints quite fast, less than 2 seconds, as expected. But when I add a “Draft” watermark to the same page and send it to the printer, it prints much slower and can take up to 20 or 30 seconds for the same page to print.
A: The slowness in printing is due to a known issue that Java has with printing and transparency.
If you have control over the creation of this PDF that you need to print, we suggest a few workarounds which should alleviate or remove this problem:
- Instead of using text with transparency, use opaque text but add it behind the page content
- Instead of using text with transparency, use opaque text and add it in front of the page content but make it smaller and lighter in color so that it is not intrusive. This is what we do when we add “Qoppa Software” as a “watermark” in demo version.
- Make the size smaller for the transparent watermark (the smaller the area covered, the faster it will print…)
- Convert the page content to an image (at a lower resolution) and print the image.
