This may help with visualizing what the computer has to do, and why the
print files can get so big.
Think of it as those neat pictures in the old encyclopedias where you could
add layers to the human body. While this isn't a perfect analogy, it does
hold up pretty well. On these pictures in the encyclopedias, they start
with the skeleton on a regular page and have several clear plastic pages
that lay over this basic skeleton. They add the layer with the blood
vessels, then the layer with the muscles, then the skin. Each layer was
mostly clear plastic (only the parts that changed were drawn on the
plastic), but it was a full page overlay.
Each object with a transparency adds a new page layer to the printer's
output file. The reason that PDF works so much faster for printing, is that
the slides layers have been flattened to a single layer. Adobe software
does the layering of transparencies and generates a single layer picture
that is sends as a single layer page.
I crashed a printer once, by creating a slide with a couple of hundred
partial transparencies on it. Poor thing, I think it is still wheezing.
Hope this helps,
Bill Dilworth
Microsoft PPT MVP Team
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We don't have "background printing" on, what I was