Kurt Magness

I had a similar error and it was because the dwg file somehow got locked. click on the file, then get info to see if it is a locked file. If it is locked then unlock it and try to import it. Kurt

See my post under plotter purchase... in regards to Epson printers. Custom page sizes always seem to be problematic. My epson in OS9 works fine for custom page sizes, in OSX it does not work that well although epson has a new driver that I have yet to install. I think OSX has some issues with custom page sizes. I also have a HP455 like Keven and agree with his comments. The 455 in OSX has cutter problems too, like cutting the paper at 3/4" past the last image but I just solved it by having a border line at the edge of the sheet to force the cutter to cut at 36" (D size). All plotters are a bitch to set up. You might find the epson has it's own issues. I think I would keep the HP and call them again, perhaps you got a new tech person that was not helpful. Some techs know there stuff and others just don't care. Tech's have bad days too. Keep calling until you get satisfaction. If one guy can't help, hang up and call again and get somebody else. VWKS 8.5 is pretty old. Perhaps you should upgrade. Crashing sounds like a corrupt font issue or software conflict. Try doing a simple drawing with basic fonts to see if that crashes.

I have the epson 9600, same as 7600 except wider and it works fine in OSX. I beleive the 7000 is an older model, the 7600 is the latest of the 7000 series. I hear the 7000 had problems with the ink longevity and head cleaning. Epson has pigmented inks (ultrachrome model) which do not fade (+/- 50 years) as compared to dye based inks (+/- 6 months). Epson also has better color reproduction because they gear there printers to photogaraphers, artists, etc. The HP 800 has dye based inks and HP gears there products for engineers, architects, etc. Epson uses piezo print heads which are finer, Hp uses thermo heads which boil the ink before it sprays it out. Epson says this boiling screws up the colors, although I have seen great output from HP machines. I got the 9600 primarly for photography and fine art but it works fine for CAD also. The cheapest HP with pigmented inks is the 5000 series which is $10,000 + . The Epson consumables are probably more expensive than HP's but not by much. The HP 800 has a RIP on the plotter's hard drive which you can que up many drawings to, freeing up the computers faster especially on a network if ( a big if) you get the software to work properly. Hp's software is notorious for being funky but any large format printer takes a while to setup correctly. You might want to have your dealer set it up for you. I would not recomend doing it your self unless you like to do that sort of stuff. The base 7600 does not use a RIP but you do not really need one since OSX multitasks pretty good or print on off peak hours. A RIP can be purchased separately (lots more money) but this is more for a printhouse type of operation. For straight CAD production, I would recomend the HP. For fine art and photography, with CAD drawings too, I would recomend the epson 7600. Both are good machines but the epson is less expensive comes with one year service free, and has better output. Another consideration is if a dealer or service center is close by in case of problems. I would recomend getting the machine from a dealer that will set it up for you and provide service close by versus, buying the machine from the internet, mail order or ebay unless you like to spend hours figuring it out for yourself. This might influence your decision on which machine to go with. I have a HP dealer a 1/2 hour away for service and it has come in handy many times. I have a HP455 also, but I chose the Epson for my new plotter because I was tired of seeing my art work fade to nothing within months.

Austin: I have a Asante' cable dsl router with the print server /parallel port too. Is this your setup ? But I haven't tried to use it to driver the plotter because Asante' said the printer needed to be post script. I use a HP jetdirect server instead. How did you get the IP address, etc. of the plotter through your print server/router? If I can elminate the Jetdirect, then there would be one less power brick on the power strip. Kurt

I do not think updating the OS will do it alone although you should always have the latest versions of the software. You probably will need a OSX driver from HP. Call the HP tech line to see if such a animal exists. i have heard rumors. Also maybe firmware update for the HP 500. You might also want to have an Jetdirect print server if you don't already have one. Do you connect to the plotter with USB from one machine ?. Try Ebay for cheap used ones but ask HP first which model you need. Alternately you can use gimp print ( a free driver ) to drive the HP500 from the OSX machine (if you have a jetdirect ) and for go the HP RIP all together. Or just transfere the VWKS file to the OS9 machine to plot

How about re-installing VWKS ?

Have you tried running the disk utlity program to fix & verify disk permissions? I have one computer that freezes alot and that seems to help. Kurt

Gimp print is a free OSX driver for most printers & plotters. Check out the many posts about it here in the printing section.

HP is the standard, epson's have nice photo output. Used or older machines have 3rd party drivers, otherwise stick with what comes with the plotter if you buy a new one. HP has a new inexpense Designjet 10 for under $1,000 dollars out, check out the mac mailorder companies for pricing or buy from your hp dealer. The plotters are a bit tricky to setup and if you buy from a dealer they will do it for you and hopefully be nice to you when it doesn't work, which will happen sometimes.

The 488 is a good machine but you will be using gimprint or xrip from microspot to drive it. HP does not support this machine in OSX. Gimprint is really not that bad to set up and it is free, with plenty of users on this tech board to help with the setup. You will need the jetdirect printserver too which comes with the mac version (post script) of the plotter but not the pc version. Alternately HP just came out with the designjet 10 plotter for just under $1,000 dollars for the base model, so do not pay too much for the 488. It will handle up to a d size sheet. Looks pretty interesting and since it is new, HP has OSX drivers for it. Although HP's drivers are traditionally problematic on Macs. I have not talked to anybody with the new plotter.

There are two things I have found out that create printing errors. the corrupted font issue and using fill patterns other than the first row in the pallet. They were real frustrating at first. Either not printing at all or cryptic error messages. And most people are really frustrated when it works on a cheap desktop printer but not on the plotter. OSX and plotters appear to be more sensitive to these kind of issues. Now I know what to look for. The first thing I do is try to print/ plot the file one layer at a time to see if some layers plot and others don't. Once you isolated the problem layer or layers then you can look more closely at what is in that layer. Then you must ungroup the objects in that layer (best to make a copy of the problem file first). The reason for this is custom selection will not pick up individual objects if they are in a group with others. First do a select all then look at the font menu and under fonts it will put a dash next to all the fonts it finds. Any non basic fonts are suspect. Switch one or all to geneva and then try to print. If it works then you found it or them. Isolate and reinstall from the originals. Do not just try to drag them over from another machine. Or if you do not have the originals (pirated copies), drag them onto your desktop first, over the network, from machine that have no problems, then put them in the font folder in your system folder. I put all non true type fonts in the OS9 font folder not OSX. If this doesn't find any thing, then I look for patterns. I custom select patterns rows at a time until it finds one or more patterns. You know when you got one when the fill box shows a pattern. Also it helps when you do a select all to click the show all button at the bottom of the window. This is important because objects can be beyond the limits of the screen and cause problems. This is especially true when new draftspeople leave all sorts of stuff out there in the file. A little 1/2" x 1/2" filled box, way out in space, or one letter in a text block, can cause the file not to print. Good hunting!

FYI: It was Katie who originally suggested a corrupted font issue to me way back when I switched to OSX and was having problems printing a particular file. Lets all pat ourselves on the back that we can figure this stuff out. There are two things I have found out that create printing errors. the corrupted font issue and using fill patterns other than the first row in the pallet. They were real frustrating at first. Either not printing at all or cryptic error messages. And most people are really frustrated when it works on a cheap desktop printer but not on the plotter. OSX and plotters appear to be more sensitive to these kind of issues. Now I know what to look for. The first thing I do is try to print/ plot the file one layer at a time to see if some layers plot and others don't. Once you isolated the problem layer or layers then you can look more closely at what is in that layer. Then you must ungroup the objects in that layer (best to make a copy of the problem file first). The reason for this is custom selection will not pick up individual objects if they are in a group with others. First do a select all then look at the font menu and under fonts it will put a dash next to all the fonts it finds. Any non basic fonts are suspect. Switch one or all to geneva and then try to print. If it works then you found it or them. Isolate and reinstall from the originals. Do not just try to drag them over from another machine. Or if you do not have the originals (pirated copies), drag them onto your desktop first, over the network, from machine that have no problems, then put them in the font folder in your system folder. I put all non true type fonts in the OS9 font folder not OSX. If this doesn't find any thing, then I look for patterns. I custom select patterns rows at a time until it finds one or more patterns. You know when you got one when the fill box shows a pattern. Also it helps when you do a select all to click the show all button at the bottom of the window. This is important because objects can be beyond the limits of the screen and cause problems. This is especially true when new draftspeople leave all sorts of stuff out there in the file. A little 1/2" x 1/2" filled box, way out in space, or one letter in a text block, can cause the file not to print. Good hunting!

did you check "high resolution printing" in page setup, settings, vectorworks ?

Keep the engineers working on the problems and not wasting time ( like me ) in these forums ( I should be doing something more billable ). Katie can take the heat if we are half way nice to her.

Wow, Katie get down with your bad self ! I have noticed you have been getting more crabby since you first started in tech support. I guess that's part of the job and I am sure you burn out very quickly listening to us complaining about VWKS. But we still love ya anyway. Thanks for the slapping us around and keeping us in line!

I prefer to take photos of real trees and use them in photoshop with a VWS final rendering. They look so much better. It seems like all the tree 3d models I have seen are not that great. They look like the fake christmas trees you see in drugstores at christmas time. There is a program that generates very realistic trees called Tree by Onyx Computing. Check out their web site: http://www.onyxtree.com The more realistic the trees, the bigger the file size, so it gets out of hand very quickly. Also the program is not cheap but it's the best i have seen. You can also use pictures of real trees to make your own 3d model by texture mapping the photos onto flat planes and placing them into your model.

Artlantis is a great program, easy to use and to learn. The animation part of the program is way better than vectorworks funky path generator. I would seriously think about forgoing renderworks and buying artlantis. the cost is not that much more.

Where are you with the font issue ? Have you tried to print the file after changing suspect fonts to geneva? Or printing only layers that have no fonts or basic fonts in them?

Just got this email from Lightworks FYI: Dear Mr Magness Thank you for your email enquiry about LightWorks. For your information, LightWorks is a rendering engine which is only sold directly to software developers for integration within their software applications. LightWorks is not available as a stand alone product and can only be used within LightWorks-based applications such as VectorWorks. The Altivec support you mentioned has only just been released in LightWorks and so this will be available in future software releases. Unfortunately we are unable to provide specific information about our customers products and so I cannot really answer your question about VectorWorks. I can tell you that Altivec support should be included in a future release of VectorWorks, but I suggest that you contact Nemetscheck (who produce VectorWorks) for more details about when this might be available. I am sorry that I cannot be of more help to you but please do not hesitate to contact me again should you require any further information. Alternatively, you might also be interested in our new LightWorks-User website: www.lightworks-user.com Thanks for your interest in LightWorks. Best regards Rona Rona Treeby Marketing Manager LightWork Design 78 Clarkehouse Road, Sheffield, S10 2LJ, UK Tel: +44 114 266 8404 Fax: +44 114 266 1383 Email: rona.treeby@lightworkdesign.com Websites: www.lightworkdesign.com and www.lightworks-user.com so I went to the user site but all the downloads etc use what is called "LWA enabled" files which I can guarantee Vwks does not use yet. cool stuff though. Any comments from Dave?

I think the Altivec support would benefit a lot more users than all the cool rendering affects would. At least if you got a Mac. Since Macs have had the power pc chip for so long now it is almost like "it's about time". Dual processor support would be also a good idea since Macs have had DP's for awhile too. Faster is always better. Vectorworks should be doing this for the basic program too! Does lightworks support some kind of upgrade path for renderworks such that you could buy lightworks separately if you wanted the bells and whistles?

This would be good. I will remain calm for now. As to when VWKS will take advantage of this is anybodies guess. Kati any response ?

I got a pictwpstops error on a drawing I was printing to my 455ca plotter w/ gimpprint (VWKS 9.5.3, OS 10.2.4). It was a corrupted font that was causing the problem. I did a select all then to the font menu and noticed one font that was suspect. I changed it to geneva and then it printed fine.

try gimpprint instead of microspot. it is free on the web and I have been using it for a few months with minor complaints. see older designjet posts for web address. robinc: how did you print to your epson 7600 in OSX? i have a 9600 and epson says no OSX driver yet.

Try gimpprint it is free and I beleive supports the 500 or 800. check other posts on older designjet printing for gimpprint web site

Our machines used to crash VWKS 9.5.3 on OS10.2.4, but I did what katie suggests above and that appears to have solved the problem