Plotmaker

[Anonymous]

I have a love and hate relationship with Plotmaker, I love the possibilities of printing the same plan with various layer combinations through the publisher but I hate the tools which are still pretty dire and I experience also the following:

1) Very slow updating/importing of hotlinked files.

2) Many sessions Plotmaker grinds to a halt stating that Archicad does not respond. I click continue and this mostly cures the pausing.

3) Warnings in Plotmaker that some libraries were missing or not loaded. This never seems to give a problem but the message keeps popping up after almost every import session. I always make sure that all required libraries are loaded when I start up Archicad and before publishing. I have a number of Cygraph add on's but these are not all used in every project.

Am I the only one experiencing these problems?

Thanks

Daniel Dusoswa MSc MRIAI MIEI


_________________
dod architects
Ireland

[TomWaltz]

Welcome to the "I Love/Hate Plotmaker" Club, Daniel!!!

Your problems are not unique.....

[Anonymous]

Daniel wrote:

1) Very slow updating/importing of hotlinked files.

Slower than updated the pmk's in archicad and then opening several individual sheets to plot? I will tolerate a little slowness for the layout book with my sheets and details automatically numbered.

2) Many sessions Plotmaker grinds to a halt stating that Archicad does not respond. I click continue and this mostly cures the pausing.

This seems to be a problem with slower processors. I have several older G4 macs that this happens with, but never with the newer faster machines.

3) Warnings in Plotmaker that some libraries were missing or not loaded.

Having the same path from computer to computer to matching libraries has eliminated this problem from our office. Make sure that the path is named EXACTLY the same on all of the machines including the name of the hard drive.

[kevin b]

Millard wrote:

Daniel wrote:


1) Very slow updating/importing of hotlinked files.

Slower than updated the pmk's in archicad and then opening several individual sheets to plot? I will tolerate a little slowness for the layout book with my sheets and details automatically numbered.

I agree, pros outweigh cons on this.

2) Many sessions Plotmaker grinds to a halt stating that Archicad does not respond. I click continue and this mostly cures the pausing.

This seems to be a problem with slower processors. I have several older G4 macs that this happens with, but never with the newer faster machines.

Seems to worse on G4 laptops compared to G4 desktops of same age. You are right though with G5s this one is more or less a non-issue. We had some issues where clicking continue was not helpful. By happy accident we discovered letting it sit and clicking nothing and it solved itself after a few seconds.

3) Warnings in Plotmaker that some libraries were missing or not loaded.

Having the same path from computer to computer to matching libraries has eliminated this problem from our office. Make sure that the path is named EXACTLY the same on all of the machines including the name of the hard drive.

Doesn't having everyone's hard drive named the same thing lead to other issues around the network, not necessarily with ArchiCAD/Plotmaker??

[__archiben]

kevin wrote:
Doesn't having everyone's hard drive named the same thing lead to other issues around the network, not necessarily with ArchiCAD/Plotmaker??

no - because the name of the hard disk on the machine is not the same as the computer name broadcast over the network (which is set in your 'Sharing' system prefs tab . . .)

regardless - i would still like to see an overhaul of the networking/path name/file naming protocols on the mac platform.

~/archiben