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Slow plotting

RICKT

New member
Hello,





I'm having trouble plotting out detailed drawings out of ProE Wildfire 2.0. It takes 3-5 minutes to just send the file to the plotter. I'm using an HP 450C Designjet.


Wildfire creates a 2-3 meg file for a C size drawingbut when converted to a dwg file the file size is 33k.


When trying to send the dwg file out of Wildfire to the plotter, Proe converts it back to a 3-5 meg file again and takes the same amount of time to plot. Of course the ProE drawing when coverted to dwg lost some of the text alignment and the line quality was not as good.


Does anyone have any suggestions. I've tried to convert to PDFs but the file sizes are just as large and take the same amount of time. I used PDF creator for the PDF converstion.
 
We have a 450C. It is a slow piece of sh*t but probably not 3-5 minutes worth. You probably have a network problem where it is waiting for a timeout to elapse before trying another route.

I think the 450C only runs on PJL not HP-GL let alone the more efficient HP-GL/2 and parallel ports are not known for high speed.


DB


Edited by: Dell_Boy
 
Taz,

I only occasionally print directly to any printer and virtually never directly to the 450C.

Most of the time I print full sized postscripts to file and use an old version of Distiller to create the pdfs. It works VERY well, particularly with multiple sheet sizes in a single drawing, so I don't see any need to change it.

Are you windows printing or plotting the original way via .pcf where you in effect print to file and send the file to the printer via a batch file.


DB


Edited by: Dell_Boy
 
Dell,


Im just using the print manager in Proe. I found it always worked well enough for 2001. I print to a selection of printers / plotters depending on what size print-off i need ( usually A4 - A3 ).


All our printers are network based.


Im still using 2001 for some jobs, and printing is fine using the print manager in pro. Could this be a WF2 bug that we have ?


Im using datecode M200


Ta


Taz
 
RickT,

you say that converting to pdf and plotting that takes the same amount of time. This reinforces the notion that it is a network error. If this is the case, getting a new plotter will not fix your problem unless it changes the relative connectivity to the network.


DB
 
Taz,

check your environmental variables for the path setting in both user and system. I only ever have one proe\bin path even though I have multiple versions loaded in parallel. When I want to change version I edit the path because I don't like the idea of having 2 or more bin folders live.


Also did a search on the knowledge base on "exit" in PLOT. The results are at

http://tinyurl.com/kzzuf

See if any of these are an approximate match for situation.


have you hacked or removed any of the loadpoint .pcf files?


DB
 
Thank you. I have restated my question since I thinkwith not being an IT person that I should tackle this problem by asking if the plotter we are thinking of buying in place of the HP 450C will do the job for us. It is becoming obvious that ProE doesn't talk well with the 450.


I have restated the question in another posting to see if the Encad T200 will do a better job. Please let me know if you have any input to this question.
 
We have the same problem printing to an HP 5SiNX Laser Jet.


It is slow with both ProE and with PDF's, it is fine with any Office document or Anvil drawing. It does not make any difference whether the file is coming from WF 2.0 or 2001.


The printer just seems to take forever to receive the file.


I'm thinking it's either network of maybe memory. I don't really think it's a problem with your particular printer unless it's a memory issue. I think our printer has 4MB of memory.
 
We have decided that it is text that the printer has trouble with when generated out of ProE. The less text the faster the plotter processes the file. We have decided to upgrade to an HP 1050C or HP 1055C. I guess ProE isn't for the low end plotters.
 
Rick,

if your drawings use a TrueType font instead of a line font for your text, that would certainly blow out the size of the plot file to many printers.


DB
 

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