When you’re working on presentations and other documents for your company, your efforts can result in complex, multi-page files that require a lot of printer memory to process. If the job exceeds your hardware’s capabilities, you may encounter issues ranging from defective printouts to complete output failure. Look for common symptoms of memory-starved hardware to simplify troubleshooting.
Error Messages
Memory-related problems will typically generate an on-screen or printed error message containing terms such as “vmerror” or “limitcheck” on a PostScript laser printer set to report error messages. Pages of PostScript code, which looks like a cross between English and programming language, may be spit out by the printer. Printers without integrated or external PostScript processors may display on-screen messages indicating that your print job cannot be completed.
Partial Printouts
When you send your laser printer a job that’s too big for it to complete, it may print as much as it can and then stop at the point at which it runs out of memory. This can produce partial pages or content that splits across pages in an otherwise incomplete document. You may be able to identify a specific element that causes the out-of-memory condition – for example, a complex graphic – because only part of it appears on paper. In a page layout that contains numerous bitmaps you are reproducing at small percentages of actual size, the printer may receive the full data set comprising the original, high-resolution images but stop just before printing the largest image in the document.
Flushed or Stuck Print Job
In some cases, printer memory issues cause print jobs to appear and disappear from the list of output projects without ever being printed. Such issues can also result in projects that are neither completed nor removed from the list of pending jobs. You can delete or purge items that never print, but the jobs you flush out of the print queue won’t finish until you resolve the issue that caused the interruption.
Strategies and Considerations
When your printer lacks the memory to process a job, you can take short- or long-term steps to get your document on paper. Printing a complex multi-page document in sections may permit you to complete your project. Likewise, you may be able to allocate more memory to your job by changing memory-related settings when you print.
Linking graphics rather than embedding them may simplify the printing process. Creating an at-size, scaled-down version of each large bitmap in a project that uses them at a reduced size lessens the amount of information that the printer must process. If your application includes an option to send optimized down-sampled data to the printer, you may be able to reduce the burden of large images without pre-processing them in an image-editing application.
When the printer is out of memory because it’s busy with another print job, wait for it to complete or interrupt it if your new print job takes priority. Finally, if you find yourself routinely printing documents that tax your printer’s memory, consider increasing the amount of RAM installed in the device, if it accepts user-installed upgrades.
