Universal Print creates large uncompressed PDF print jobs causing UP‑native printers to fail

Universal Print on Windows produces very large, uncompressed PDF print payloads when printing from Microsoft 365 Apps, browsers, or any Windows application.
This occurs on all Windows versions that use the Universal Print rendering pipeline.

What happens:

Windows renders print jobs as XPS, then converts them to PDF for Universal Print.
The resulting PDF is not optimized or compressed (no image downsampling, no deduplication, no object stream compression).
The final PDF job sent to Universal Print becomes extremely large:
- macOS → UP: ~5 MB (optimized PDF)
- Windows → UP: 50–150 MB (uncompressed PDF)

This leads to:

Excessive upload times to Universal Print
Printer‑side PDF rasterizer overload on UP‑native printers
Slow printing or job failures on devices with limited PDF memory
Significant bandwidth and performance impact in enterprise networks

Expected behavior:

Windows should:

Optimize or compress PDFs before uploading to Universal Print
Match or approach macOS PDF rendering behavior (Quartz)
Reduce job size without affecting print quality
Reduce failures on Universal Print ready devices

Actual behavior:

PDFs generated by the Windows UP pipeline are 10–30× larger than macOS
Jobs overwhelm UP‑native printers during PDF rasterization
Some jobs fail with “Aborted” or stall indefinitely
Behavior is consistent across vendors (Konica Minolta, Ricoh)

Why this needs attention:

This issue is entirely tied to the Windows → Universal Print rendering pipeline.
Printer manufacturers cannot fix or influence the XPS→PDF workflow.
It leads to poor reliability and performance across enterprise environments using UP.

Steps to reproduce:

Use a Universal Print native printer (e.g., Konica Minolta c250i).
Print a multi‑page Excel/PDF/PowerPoint document from Windows 10/11.
Observe PDF job size in the Universal Print admin portal.
Repeat from macOS printing to the same UP printer.
Compare PDF sizes: macOS job is up to 30× smaller.