PDF Printing Size Balloons in Citrix

Hi,

We are in the midst of testing JDE in Citrix environment. We noticed that for most users, the PDF files increases more than 3 times its size in the print jobs, and sometimes more! Is it related to the driver?

We are running on Citrix Metaframe XPs Feature Release 3 with Service Pack 3 on Windows 2000(SP4)

Samuel,

What are you using for the printer drivers? If you are using the Citrix Universal Print Driver (I suspect you are) you will see PDFs balloon 3 to 10 times in size. The UPD converts everything into a bitmap. You can imagine how well this goes over when you're working with a WAN. Trust me, it goes over like a lead balloon. Set up your citrix servers with standard laser printer drivers that come native to Win2K. Lock down your printer definitions tight so that Citrix won't try to load every printer driver under the sun. Failure to do that will lead to nasty BSODs (Blue Screens of Death for you non-NT admins out there).

We expirimented with the Citrix UPD. It worked great, as long as you were on a lan. But if you have a WAN like we do, that concept went right out the window.

Gregg Larkin
Praxair, Inc.
North American PeopleSoft
Enterprise One System Administrator

Yeah Gregg. True enough we were on a mixture of Universal and Native drivers. The Universal drivers were giving us a big problem. Now, it's all on native, the size has gone down tremendously!

Thanks!

But 1 funny thing that I noticed was that some of the client printers are not displayed/not displayed at the Terminal Server, but yet, it still prints. How is this possible?

And when a user displays a pdf, the session can't log off after the user logs off JDE, it will just show as Disconnected. If he doesn't open the pdf file, he logs off properly. I read that Acrobats are not fully compliant with Thin Clients. Is this one of the problems that we are facing? By the way, we are running the latest Adobe Acrobat 6.0

Samuel,

Glad to hear that you found the cause of the ballooning PDFs. Citrix UPD is a nice concept, but flawed. Oh well.

I haven't seen the other issues that you are running into. Probably because our LAN guys set an inactivity timeout on Citrix sessions. After 30 minutes of inactivity, Citrix sends a warning. If that is ignored, it logs out the session.

I've used a number of different versions of Adobe acrobat, I have no complaints. Good luck!

Gregg Larkin
Praxair, Inc.
North American PeopleSoft
Enterprise One System Administrator

Gregg,

Seems that our Acrobat runs wisptis.exe everytime it's loaded. I noticed that Microsoft Journal Viewer was installed on the Citirx server(which serves no purposes!) and uninstalled it. Running fine now!