When a printer can't cope with Pages

Note: If the title of this post confused you into thinking that it is about dealing with professional printshops please refer to these articles on this blog where the subject is dealt with.

What to do if your desktop printer chokes on a large Pages document? It blinks and gurgles showing that it is working hard to print out your work, but suddenly stops and nothing comes out.

It happens to me occasionally when the document is overladen with large photos and other graphics: picture background, several dozen high definition photos, lots of coloured boxes...

Let say you have a Pages document of 25-30 MB and your desktop printer can't cope. Print Pages to PDF (read how to here) and the file size goes down roughly by half to 11-12 MB. If this is still too big for your printer,

use Save PDF to iPhoto option in the Print Dialogue window

Your Pages document goes into iPhoto, turns into a JPEG and shrinks to 1.5 MB. Print it straight from iPhoto. The screen quality of the JPEG is still ok, but on paper the quality is only good for proofing.

Printing PDF to iPhoto is also very useful when you need to send out your projects created in Pages via email or for display on the internet. Read and earlier article about this here.

And if you are a small struggling business another consideration may come in handy. You may sometimes be duped into creating original publicity material for dishonest clients who then disappear or refuse to pay on various pretexts knowing that you won't have time or money to chase them. Sending out JPEGs instead of press quality PDFs will leave cheaters with just low grade files.