Printing Issue with Snow Leopard

My wife, while plugged directly into our Brother HL-2070N through the USB, has issues when trying to print documents. She tries to set it to print two pages per sheet. The documents are no more than 20 pages total, and in PDF form, and theoretically shouldn't take that long to spool. Is there any known cause for slow printing between a MacBook and OSX? Or anything I could check to help speed it up?

Have you tried getting the latest drivers from Brother's website?

Drivers were downloaded and installed from the Brother site, and the printing lag is still severe. Any suggestions?

What kind of printing lag are we talking about? And which software is she using to do the printing? Printing two pages to a sheet does take longer to spool on most printers and printing to PDF will also induce additional time.

Also keep in mind that specs for printers are usually quoted for ideal conditions, both network and in Windows. Speed also depends on the quality of the drivers.

We're talking lag of hours. She started several print jobs, and the first was barely printing out an hour later. I've seen dual pages per sheet take a little longer, but the fact it's taking that long to print that much seems a bit wrong. All of the initial issues were printed through Adobe Reader software.

I can say when she prints one page per sheet from Preview, the printing begins immediately with no lag. But the need to save paper is the need for the dual pages. Once we tried multiple pages per sheet through Preview the problem persisted again.

I agree. That's a ridiculous amount of time to have to wait. I was thinking in terms of maybe waiting several minutes not hours. The only thing I can think of is that it's a poorly written driver for OS X.

The fact that the print job runs OK from Preview with one page per sheet and not with two pages per sheet has to be a driver thing. That particular printer has plenty of internal memory (16 MB) and its speed is rated at 20 PPM (ideal) so there is absolutely no excuse for that kind of printing delay.

I don't know if we can find a substitute driver that may work better. I'll look around on the Linux printing site. I just went there - but it looks like the HL 2060N is supported but not the 2070N.

Is it possible for your wife to use Windows instead? I was thinking maybe you could setup Boot Camp or a VM. If not, you may have to live with one page per sheet.

Yeah we have a Windows desktop we can use, we just haven't gotten the desk and everything put back together since we moved, and the printer has always worked fine with that machine. It's an older Dell running XP.

But yeah it just seemed like something uncharacteristic, and something I felt maybe someone else had encountered and coule shed some light on...

How about deleting the printer then reinstalling it. Have you restarted the computer lately?