line weight help

[Anonymous]

I am looking for a good tutorial on plotting and line weights with archicad 11 and a hp design jet 500. I've managed this pretty well in auto-cad and micro-station this is just throwing me for a loop an advice or help is appreciated.

[Laszlo Nagy]

In ArchiCAD this is rather simple, you need to know 3 things:
1. Each Pen has its own line weight (Options\Element Attributes\Pen & Colors). Layer, Blocks etc. do not override this.
2. The View\On-Screen View Options\True Line Weight and View\On-Screen View Options\Bold Cut Line toggles have an effect on how line weights are displayed on screen but these do not effect output.
3. In both the Plot Dialog and the Print Dialog you can check the Hairline checkbox, if it is checked, everything will be output using the thinnest line weight possible, otherwise everything will be output with the original line weights defined in the Pens &Colors Dialog.

[Anonymous]

At our office we also so have a HP Designjet 500, and I've noticed that when I choose the "print" option to plot to the HP, the text has a pleasant look about it, but the drawing isn't as good a quality as we would like.

Alternatively, when I choose the "plot" option to plot to the HP, the drawings are far more desirable, but the text becomes 'fuzzy' and 'jaggered'.

We generally use the print function to plot, but sometimes the HP 'loses' information due to insufficient memory, so I plot via plot flow 1.4, then the differences above occur.

Any help would be great.

[Gerald Hoffman]

Shingleback wrote:
At our office we also so have a HP Designjet 500, and I've noticed that when I choose the "print" option to plot to the HP, the text has a pleasant look about it, but the drawing isn't as good a quality as we would like.

Alternatively, when I choose the "plot" option to plot to the HP, the drawings are far more desirable, but the text becomes 'fuzzy' and 'jaggered'.

We generally use the print function to plot, but sometimes the HP 'loses' information due to insufficient memory, so I plot via plot flow 1.4, then the differences above occur.

Any help would be great.

I print with my old trusty HP650C and don't have these problems. What I often do these days is make PDFs first then print these out. Give this a try to see if it makes any difference. You may need to upgrade your ram on your HP500 if you run out consistently.

Cheers,

[Anonymous]

I have an Epson R2880 that can print 1400DPI. I posted on another forum (Mac) about how to get better lines when printing from PDF. I was told that I should look how I can print at the highest resolution possible, which is 1440DPI, by the printer.

Upon export (PDF) should I set the resolution to 1200-2400DPI? The other forum said something about if I can print 1400DPI, it will be a vector and will not be rasterized but I became confused with this.

I need to save as PDF (or any format) to edit the layout to remove the educational logo as my Uni don't like to see this... Maybe if I export to a DWG. and open the page in Adobe Illustrator; this will produce a pure vector?

Thank You