Cameron Murdoch

Katie, Well it seems that we have not been successful. Initial reports were good and suggested that the driver fandango described above had fixed the issue. However, we are still getting regular blacked out text. I will send you one of the offending files asap. Cam

It has been happening to most of our files, however, we may have fixed it. After what you said about the latest driver fixing the problem I tried deleting the exsisting driver, (reporting itself as 5.35) and installed 5.35 from scratch. Having done this I was able to print 3 perfect plots without rasterizing (not normal). Whilst it is too early to be sure it seems that even though the driver was claiming to be 5.35 it may have had bits of the old driver lurking about. I have performed this task on all the architects workstations and will let them stress test it. If we get any black text I will email you those drawings. Cam

Katie, The About box in the driver states: HP DesignJet Printer Driver v5.35 Cam

As I have mentioned on this list a while ago my company is still struggling to plot reliably with VW10.5.1. The problem is similar to that which many people have reported: text printing out as black blocks a significant amount of the time. This problem has been present since installing VW10. VW8.5 had no problem with the same setup. Computers are running Windows 2000 with the latest service packs and patches. Plotter is a HP800 with a built in JetDirect Card; printing is over the network. We have the latest plotter firmware: A.02.10 We have the latest printer driver: 5.35 We have tried fiddling with the spooling settings; I have tried turning spoolsmart off; we have tried the rasterizing print option. I think that rasterizing has produced the best results but it isn?t perfect and takes ages to print. With 15 architects trying to plot all the time it isn?t really workable. Recently we upgraded the plotter memory to the maximum but it hasn?t helped. The amount of time and paper, (and now memory) we have wasted over the last year or two has probably more than doubled the price we paid for VW10!! Please can somebody fix this. [ 07-11-2004, 11:00 AM: Message edited by: Cameron Murdoch ]

As reported on this list a while ago my company is still having issues regarding the above setup. The main issue is that text often prints out blacked, looking like small blobs. We don't have corrupted fonts. This happens from Win2K on all 15 machines. We have sent a file into VW tech support months ago but heard nothing. With VW10.1.2 and HP spoolsmart turned off things improved. (note they did not disappear). Because of this I haven't bothered to follow the issue up. Having now upgraded to VW10.5, the problem has returned with force. Of course it did't show up when testing . Other posts talk about a Raster print option which I can't see anywhere. What is the latest things to try?

Katie, where is this firmware update? The only one I can see is: REVISION: A.02.06, which was released last year?

Katie, I apologise (lots!) for not getting back sooner. Are your still interested in a file? Cam

Is that request directed at me, HJ or both of us?

Katie, I have tried the 'print to a file' method and it hasn't helped. This is what I have done so far: Printed a drawing normally until some kind of discrepancy appears, (ie blocked text or bits of the drawing missing) and then tried ie with the print to file method, which had little or no effect. There was one difference on one file though; when printed to a file some of the line widths were altered, and printed out fainter than they should do. Don't know if that helps, but I will keep trying. Cam

Just tried printing to a file. It only produces a .ps file if you use that extension - remember my plotter is non-postscript. I am not in the office at the moment so had to ring up to get somebody else to check the plot. It printed out ok but that might not mean anything seeing as sometimes things print fine anyway. I will email some people in the office and get them to try tomorrow. (it is 6:30pm here). What are we checking for here? Cam

The font we use is Ariel which I believe is a standard windows font. It might be installed with MS Office though - can't remember, so I will check. The plotter is attached via the network. Our configuration is as follows: HP DesignJet 800 (non ps) connected to TCP/IP network via build in Jetdirect card. This is a 10/100 Mb/sec card. One of our Win2K servers (service pack 2) is set to print directly to the IP address of the plotter and then our clients print to the printer share on this server. The print server is a well specified machine with 512Mb RAM and 1Gb/sec network connectivity. All of the clients run Win2K professional (Service pack 3) and connect to the network at 100Mb/s. Hope that helps. Cam

We have tried the suggestions that have been made without any real success. Some of them may have helped slightly but none have fixed the problem. I understand that producing a large computer program is a difficult task and that conforming to multiple platforms, operating systems, etc is hard. I also understand that there will be other problems and I definitely understand that each person will regard his issue as the most important; I am a sysadmin after all!! However, my real problem here is that printing from vectorworks worked fine in version 8 and is broken in version 10. I don't want to become cliched but this increasingly feels like we have upgraded to software that is more buggy that what we already had. Also, speaking as a customer, being told about other people's problems is not helpful. I paid for Vectorworks to perform a certain task which is does not do. Improving the software is one thing, but breaking things that already worked is the sort of thing that annoys people. Just some kind of timescale would be useful, and I am fully aware that problems like these are not easy to time. If it is going to be months then we will have to try and come up with a different plan of our own. Cam

Katie, I appreciate that this is a complex issue, but the architects I work for are losing significant time and money because of it. In addition to the text problem some people can't even print certain drawings. One of the architects has spent much of today trying unsuccessfully print a drawing and can't get any other work done. As mentioned before, none of these problems occurred in VW8. The upgrade to VW10, which cost us a not inconsiderable amount of money has made life far harder for my company. Downgrading to VW8 is also not an option as a file created in VW10 but saved in VW8 format still exhibits the same printing problems. I am sure that the printer engineer has many things to consider and investigate but at the moment this problem is seriously affecting our business and we are not even that busy at the moment. In a few weeks/months when a large project is due to start the current situation will be unacceptable. Still thanks for all that you have done, Cameron Murdoch

Sorry to butt in but as Graham, (who I work for) mentions above, the 3.21 software is not a printer driver, but the version of the software installer. I had this information from HP technical support yesterday. Again according to HP, v5.32 of the driver is not an autocad specific driver and they say it 'should' work with vectorworks. Previous versions of this driver, (5.31, etc) worked flawlessly with vectorworks 8.5. I have tried vectorworks 8.5 with v5.32 and it still works though not with a drawing created in vectorworks 10 (and saved as a v8 file) which prints out with bits missing or the text jumbled up.