Print Speed - Mac

[Anonymous]

This might be better under the hardware topic but here goes.

I've just changed over to Mac, I'm using OSX Tiger latest upgrade and an HP 500 Designjet, fairly common machine among us lesser mortals.

As far as I can see the range of printing speeds is restricted to one on the Mac and fairly slow at that, I'm used to working with the DRAFT setting on windows the quality of which is good enough for most work and seems to be around twice as fast as printing on the Mac, which explains why I missed last nights deadline (again). The Windows options are, Draft, Low, Medium and High, High takes forever.

Is there some control I'm missing or do the options on the Mac need upgrading.

I note too that when printing the same drawing on widows and Mac the line weights on the Mac appear heavier than their windows equivalents

Chris Dennehy

[Anonymous]

Chris: You should have all of the options you are used to ie draft, good, better. I would suspect that you have not added the printer correctly (in the Mac printer set up utility), and thus your driver is not the correct one. Go back to the Printer setup utility and throw out the old printer then reinstall. The correct procedure to add a printer varies, so check the Mac help menu for guidance.

[Anonymous]

Thank you Dave!

I don't know why I didn't think of drivers, so I went and upgraded from HP driver 3.3 which came with Tiger to HP 4.1, no on screen difference, but it's 50Mb so something must have changed.

I then went and looked up print in the ArchiCAD on-line help and under Print Layout there's a long page on how to print in 2D which sets out all the Windows options. The fourth item under Print Layout is "printing under MacOS", which basically says what I said in the first place, you have a take or leave it situation with the Mac.

This is really disappointing and somebody needs to fix this fairly urgently as I figure that output time for even a small planning application has gone up by several hours and no I don't know or care what they do with six copies of everything submitted in six neat sets in the same order.

It's really daft because the first thing they do is scan everything into their computer so it's available on line for public view, and no! no! they can't accept it on disc.

Chris Dennehy

[Brad Elliott]

Chris,
In your Print dialog box you should be able to select Paper Type/Quality or Image Quality from the drop menu and then select the quality.

[Anonymous]

Brad,

Thank you, I looked at that and assumed that it referred to the paper you were printing on, how wrong can you be.

Thanks again.

Chris Dennehy

ArchiCAD 11(user since 4.55)
Aluminium iMac 24" + old 20" CRT as second screen
OSX Tiger with Windows XP under VMware Fusion
1st Gen MacBook OSX Tiger
Very noisy LaCie 500Gb Porche External back up

[Rod Jurich]

Chris wrote:
/......I note too that when printing the same drawing on widows and Mac the line weights on the Mac appear heavier than their windows equivalents

Chris, feel your pain. Did some work for a windows only office a while back and noticed their HP Designjet 100 produced excellent prints, not plots.
So invested my hard earned, only to learn as you describe. The print looked as if all the lines were drawn with a blunt HB pencil, on my PPC Mac using Tiger.

My son then on the "dark side" inherited that machine. My 230 was returned to service as a plotter using Plotflow.

Try saving as a plot file and send them to you printer via Plotflow (found in the Graphisoft folder) the quality will surprise you.

Now just upgraded to a Mac Pro and Leopard. You guessed right my old HP 230 will not work at all.

Take back my son's HP 100 to test and the print is just beautiful. All the HP drivers are loaded with Leopard, very straight forward.
All the line weights are clearly evident, in fact weights set to 0 are too fine now. Will need to adjust some of my settings.
Now I can print A1 size in "Hollywood Colour".

Have just ordered a new HP Designjet 100+

[Brad Elliott]

I have not yet upgraded to Leopard. Waiting for them to fix stacks. It's good to know that it might fix my HP Printer drivers. I had just recently complained on another topic that my Inkjet Printer looks nowhere as good as my very old Laserwriter. It will be the first thing I check after upgrading.

[Anonymous]

Rod,

What you say is interesting and has probably saved me a pile of time, I have put off upgrading to Leopard, though it came in a box with the iMac when I got it, until GS said it was OK and there's always a couple of bugs in the first edition which it's better to avoid.

I was about to go through the task of re-assigning pen weights under Tiger as the only way I could get a drawing to look someway professional was to print in hairline mode, I'll just plunge ahead this weekend and upgrade to Leopard and hopefully will only have to do the job once.

Many thanks to all who responded

Chris Dennehy
24" 2.4 GHz Aluminium iMac + 20" CRT Monitor
2.0 GHz 1st Gen White MacBook (you didn't expect me to pay for a black one did you)