Why is IrDA printing from my MP2000, MP2100 or eMate 300 so slow?
This could be one of two things: a software problem (for which there is a fix), or just the general nature of the IR link. Apple has released a system update which vastly improves the printing speed using the HP drivers. It’s available at http://www.newton.apple.com/product_info/sw/printpack.html#Upgrades If you have installed this update, and your printing is still too slow, it’s probably because of the way the driver software works, and the speed of the IrDA connection (ie. there’s nothing you can do about it). The IrDA printer driver creates a bitmap image from the views that you want to print and encodes that in the language for a particular printer (in this case, Hewlett-Packard’s PCL). Bitmaps are not a space-efficient way to describe images, and the resultant string is large. The Newton IrDA port operates at the IrDA 1.0-compliant speed of 115kbps. While this is quite fast for serial ports, it’s not that fast compared to a parallel port. Hence, transferring the encoded image is
