Plotting to 36" wide roll feed

[Anonymous]

I just bought a used HP 650c plotter, with no manual. (The price was too good to pass up.)

I'm new to roll feed. My drawings are coming out oriented the wrong way on the sheet.

How do I change plot setup in Plotmaker so that my 24" x 36" (architectural D size) drawings are horizontal on the roll-- thus saving paper and trimming time?

[Richard Morrison]

"Plot Setup" has a series of 4 orientation buttons. Just change to the one you need.

You might also want to consider "Printing" rather than "Plotting". It's slower, but maintains the formatting of OLE documents much better.

[Anonymous]

I tried that. The result was that I got 2 pages, oriented as I wanted them, but with only half of the information on each page- first the left half, then the right half.

Sigh... Printing? I suppose GIMP printing is the only way to go for an OS X user? Just what I need. A new thing to learn. So, tell me. Is it worth the trouble?

I was blown away by the speed of TCP/IP over Serial. Plot files that used to take 15 minutes to go the 6 feet to my plotter now take less than 10 seconds. I can't imagine that printing will be that much slower than the speed of plotting I'd gotten used to.

Where do I find out what I need to know to print with an HP 650c?

[vfrontiers]

Don't bother!.... Plotting is MUCH FASTER and since you're on a Mac, OLE doesn't matter....

Unless Apple and MS have worked things out?

[__archiben]

how to plot A1 landscape on an A0 roll feed and not waste paper. . .

see attached PDF 'how-to' that took much longer to figure out than it seems!

this was worked out for our practice back in the OS9/archiCAD 6.5 days, and for an HP330 plotter, but the principle stands:

in "Plot Setup":
• set the paper size to 'Custom' and set it's X and Y dimensions as X=618mm, Y=817mm. note that X becomes height rather than width, so simply swap these out for your architectural 'D' paper sizes!

• set margins to 'Normal'

• set orientation to print in portrait down the page (second from left)

• recheck/apply to set.

• pat yourself on the back!

by the way: printing/plotting - i can see no discernible difference between the two using the HP330. and with GIMP print there is nothing new to 'learn'. it basically installs a set of drivers on your machine that enables you to print to many more printers than the default set. (it's a bit more complicated than this, but that's all i need to know!). you then set up your printer (Print Centre or Printer Setup Utility depending on OS version and click 'add') and choose Print Setup and Print rather than Plot in archiCAD/plotmaker.

the advantages AFAIC are being able to use the marquee printing function to a print to a plotter . . .

~/archiben
(OLE is still a no go for the mac)

[Anonymous]

Thanks! I owe you one!

[Anonymous]

I spoke too soon. It's still not plotting the extreme left side of the drawings. Do I need to change some other setting?

[Djordje]

~/archiben wrote:
how to plot A1 landscape on an A0 roll feed and not waste paper. . .

Also in Tips&Tricks at http://archicad-talk.graphisoft.com/viewtopic.php?p=4040#4040

[__archiben]

Todd wrote:


I spoke too soon. It's still not plotting the extreme left side of the drawings. Do I need to change some other setting?

being a metric kind of guy from the UK i have no idea how big architectural D size is, however if it's width is still smaller than 36" it's not going to print to the extremes . . . ?

~/archiben

[Anonymous]

Oh, come on! You don't remember what 36" is? Didn't you brits invent the system?

(It's less than a meter by about a hand's width)

Anyway, I was only getting about 2/3 of the plot showing up. I have given up on it. I think I'm just going to buy some 24" rolls and be done with it.