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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-13T23:08:50+00:00

We’ve been looking into client-side printing in Silverlight 5, and we’re trying to figure

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We’ve been looking into client-side printing in Silverlight 5, and we’re trying to figure out if it’s viable for our application. The question mark is PostScript compatibility. I understand that if the target printer (or its driver) doesn’t support PS, then Silverlight will fall back to bitmap printing, but I also understand that bitmap printing is pretty slow. So the question of whether we use it or not largely hinges on the question of PostScript ubiquity.

My question is this: how common are PS and PS-compatible drivers? Are they totally ubiquitous and everywhere, or should we anticipate many customers who have to fall back to the slower bitmap method of printing? And if many/most customers have to fall back to bitmap printing, then is vector printing really viable in SL5 for commercial use?

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  1. Editorial Team

    So, I’m going to go ahead and answer my own question, since I found out.

    We tried printing a two-page document that contained one image, two horizontal lines, and a whole bunch of text. First it was printed using a PostScript-compatible printer driver, and it printed the two pages perfectly in normal printing time (i.e., not unduly long or anything).

    We then tried printing with a non-PostScript-compatible printer driver (thus forcing Silverlight to print using bitmap printing. It took 4 minutes, generated a 360mb spool file, and printed out two utterly blank pages.

    Now it’s entirely possible that we were witnessing a freak bug in the printer driver. However, we came to the conclusion that it’s not a chance we were prepared to take, and thus we deemed Silverlight 5 Vector Printing unusable.

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