I'm writing an application that does a lot of batch printing, but each print is taking several seconds to complete. I've tracked it down to the getter of property PageSettings.PrintableArea in System.Drawing.Printing - each call to that takes over one seconds to finish!
Can anyone shed any light onto why this is, and also how it can be improved?
If you look at the code for PrintableArea (in Reflector) it does a lot of native calls out to the printer driver.
From my experience when printing from .Net is slow it has to do with the printer driver. Set up a dummy printer with a generic printerdriver, or with the HP4 driver, and see if that's quicker.
If so, try a different version of the printer driver you are using today.