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

[Anonymous]

Every time I finish a drawing in Archicad, I heave a sigh, grit my teeth and wish I didn't have to spend the next few hours wrestling with Plotmaker! I've even wondered about importing a massive title block and plotting direct from Archicad (like we used to do with Autocad, before we learned how to use 'paperspace').

If it's any help, I was advised recently on this site not to attempt to use hotlinks to Archicad but publish .PMK files instead (the old-fashioned way).

It's still a pain in the butt updating stuff, though, because Plotmaker doesn't seem to do it automatically anymore.

Ever tried Autocad?

[Anonymous]

At the last firm I worked with we had no problems with direct linking from PM to AC (PLN) views. But, at my present primary client's office, there have been a variety of performance and functional problems. It may have to do with the size or organization of the project, the speed or specs of the computer, or some combination thereof.

In any case we decided to revert to publishing PMKs; probably until AC10 ships (by which time we presume this will be taken care of). We prefer to go through two quick and reliable manual processes than one slow and unreliable automatic method.