Q I created our annual family newsletter using Pages 5.6.1 under OS X 10.11.2, which I found very straightforward. However, when I tried to print it out, my colour Postscript laser printer got slower and slower with each copy. Why was that? Is Pages so buggy that it cannot even print properly?
A Pages is quite a mature, straightforward page layout app, and I agree that it is surprising that that should happen. It is hard to know exactly what is at fault here: Pages, the printer driver, the printer itself, or some unfortunate combination of two or more of them.
The workaround is thankfully very simple, and should give just as good results as printing from Pages: in its File menu, Export to PDF. Be careful to select an appropriate image quality for printing. Once Pages has generated the PDF document, double-click that and print from Preview (or your regular PDF handling app).
In theory, there should be little or no difference between these two routes. Pages generates a PDF intermediate for download to your Printer when you choose to print, and the printer driver then sends that out, in meaningful form, to your printer. In practice, though, exporting a file in PDF format and printing that is a generic technique for working around many in-app printing issues. And if Preview doesn’t help, you can always turn to Acrobat itself, as well as many other apps which can handle PDF documents.
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