Rev printing woes in Leopard

[Peter Brigham]

OK, so I had this iBook G4 (running Panther) that died, but managed to  
get all my data over to my new MacBook Intel running OSX 10.5. I have  
a stack system I use for my practice, which prints various items using  
"print card into rect" from hidden stacks that are filled by script.  
Very handy, very spiffy. I can print out beautifully formatted  
prescriptions, notes, addressed envelopes, copay receipts, forms, etc.  
Now suddenly on my new machine, it takes forever for the printer to  
respond -- up to 1 full minute for Rev to complete sending data to the  
printer (as shown in the printer status window), and up to another  
full minute after the data is sent for the printer to start churning  
out a page.

This is almost a show-stopper for me, since I sometimes have to print  
out 4-5 prescriptions and a receipt while the patient is in my office.  
I'm using a Brother MFC-8220 laserjet, and have had zero problems with  
this printer in several years up to now. When I print from other apps  
there is a delay also compared to my old setup, but it's only about 20  
seconds. I'm using the latest Brother printer driver. I have contacted  
Brother for advice, but the problem is worst with Rev, and that's  
where I need reasonable speed the most.

Since I use a laptop, I use about 5 different printers during various  
parts of my week. My stack system stores the user-chosen  
printersettings in a custom prop and sets the printersettings to this  
just before printing. I have re-stored the printer settings for the  
Brother printer after downloading the latest driver, figuring maybe  
Rev was sending the old 10.4 driver settings to the OS, but this  
doesn't help. Printing from my stack to another printer (an HP AIO at  
home) is a little slow but nothing like with the Brother machine. And  
printing from my stack to a cheap little HP inkjet printer at another  
venue results in the paper shuttling back and forth in the printer  
feeder and then successfully printing most of the page but stopping  
about 0.2 inches before the bottom of the page content and leaving the  
paper in the printer, half sticking out. (Which is really weird.)

I don't really care about the HP inkjet problem, it's printing on the  
Brother I have to fix, since my private practice where I use my stack  
system has the Brother machine. But the strange behavior of the inkjet  
in addition to the Brother points more to some wrinkle in Rev printing  
or my stack printing setup that I'm missing. Any ideas? I need to get  
this working again, and I'm getting more and more desperate.

Peter M. Brigham
pmbrig at gmail.com