Plotting woes...

[Anonymous]

Hello all.
I have a Mac and use AC9 educational version. My school's plotters are on a network that only has PCs and Autocad thus I can't find a way to plot my images and keep the line weights/ scale correct. Our school has 2 HP 1055CM plotters. So far I've sent my drawings to plotmaker where i saved them as .DWG files. I then try to open them up in autocad so i can plot from the computers in the lab (this is all at the suggestion of our "handy" tech guy). I never get the correct scale nor do i get any of the lightest line weights ( the line weights 18 and above all look the same.)

Any suggestions on what I am doing wrong or what I can do to plot the images true to what i have in my computer?

I've tried saving as a plot file and printing straight from that whereupon only 1 line weight was printed. I've tried saving as a PDF but the scale gets messed up. Several of us in our studio suffer from these problems

Thanks.

[Anonymous]

PDF would be my suggestion (Publish from plotmaker, as opposed to printing), I don't know why your scales are getting messed up. You should be able to set your scale to 100% at both the Plotmaker and and the PDF printout end. What exactly is happening to the scales?

[Anonymous]

The drawings end up being smaller than they should. I can't print directly from my computer. The way we pay for the prints messes that up so I have to take the files via jump drive to the lab.

I'll try the PDF.

Thanks.

edit: I can't publish it, I guess because I'm not connected to a printer.

[Anonymous]

Have you installed the Amyuni PDF converter from your AC installation CD? Are you publishing from Plotmaker?

[Anonymous]

Steve, is your Mac on the network? We plot to an ancient HP455ca over a network from G5's . To do this I installed GIMP drivers for our plotter and create a printer on the Mac with a manual IP address for the plotter and selecting the plotter model for the driver setup. We then either use the plot command direct to the plotter or, better, save to a spool folder and use grphisofts Plotflow for OS X to control trnasmission to the plotter.

This has produced excellent results with good lineweights and scale using AC 9 and Plotmaker