In my particular situation, plotting is still the preferred over printing. I am using a HP500ps with added cards and maxxed out memory in the machine with all of the latest drivers for the Mac from HP. With all things set to best quality in printing, both on the machine and in Plotmaker, Printing gives line weights that are too fat and noticably stair stepped. Plotting on the other hand gives crisp lines with no stair stepping and in general, cleaner looking drawings.
The speed difference is neglible between printing and plotting. I don't know if the Postscript software RIP still exists or works, but it was painfully slow on my 733 G4, and with plotting working so well, I have not bothered to check any further. Maybe someone with some experience on Macs and software RIPs could shed some light on this.
To HP's credit, they have finally developed a print driver that does appear to work properly on the Mac, sheets can be oriented properly and respond to the settings in the dialog boxes.
I am curious if anyone that is running both Macs and Windows machines sees a difference in printing and plotting between the two platforms, using the same file to the same large format printer/plotter. Looking at the signatures, Macs are plotting and Windows are printing. Given the graphic background of the Mac, I would have thought this would have been the other way around.
But then I'm a Mac user and according to some, am dumber than a stump. If some one that has actual experience on the Macintosh platform has a suggestion on how to improve print quality on my setup,provided they keep it simple with not too many syllables, I would be delighted to print.
Ted Taylor
Atlanta, GA , USA
iMac (Retina 5K, 27", Late 2015)
3.3 GHz Intel Core i5 32GB
AMD Radeon R9 M395 2GB
OS10.14.2,
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