The Printing Optimization Pack is the next generation of the Citrix printing technology that is designed to improve the user experience by shortening the time to print a document by reducing the amount of data required to print documents over slow, latent, or constrained networks. This paper details the results of the printing optimizations across a range of document types and document content. It provides data for the various compression settings and effect on print time, image quality and CPU usage for both XenApp and XenDesktop platforms. When documents are being printed, the optimizations will analyze the spool file to remove redundant graphics and further compress the spool file being sent to the client. This reduces the amount of data required and improves user experience on constrained networks. The table below shows the results of the print time and bandwidth savings delivered by the Printing Optimization Pack.

The primary lever to improve the speed of a print job is to reduce size of the actual print data that is sent from the client to the server. Citrix print technology currently compresses the print data using the ICA reducer configured with 16MB history size. However, some print streams are so large and have so much redundant data that a generalized data reduction algorithm like the reducer algorithm with only 16MB of history is not capable of factoring out as much of the redundant data as possible. Print data also includes many raster graphics that can also be substantially compressed using an image codec like the JPEG codec.

The Printing Optimization Pack introduces the following printing optimizations:

• Identify large graphic objects (images and fonts) embedded in the print data stream
• Compress graphic objects (lossless or lossy)
• Remove redundant copies of these objects from the print data stream
• Cache such objects on the client so that they only need to transit the network once.

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