macarchs

Hi - We are a Macintosh office and are printing from Vectorworks to a 36" wide HP 1055cm plus. Here's the problem: If we a print a 24x36 print on a 24" wide paper it prints perfectly and cuts it at 36". If we print on a 36" wide paper and try and rotate the print so the long direction is the width of the paper, it will be the correct orientation, but will only print 2' wide and will cut at about 30" tall. No matter what we do we can't get the printer to print 24x36 sheets on 36" wide paper and cut it properly. Anyone had the same issue? We've tried custom page sizes and border adjustments, etc, but no luck.

Thanks, but the part about other printers being affected kinda scared me. We have 4 other printers on the network and I'd hate for them to start printing in odd ways due to this change. The GIMP print definitely made a huge improvement with line wieghts and overall quality. The only remaining problem is that lines that are just of horizontal or vertical (say 1 degree or so) come out a little jaggy. Thanks.

Well - I was finally successful with setting everything up with a little help from the HP forums. Now the problem is that the print quality is pretty bad. No matter what options are chosen it has the following problems: 1. When a horizontal or vertical line is plotted as .03 line weight it looks good, but when that same line goes diagonally or as an arc it becomes much thicker. 2. The overall quality of the print is much worse than with PowerPlot and OS9. If you look closely you can see individual dots used to make up lines. What is frustrating is I know the plotter can do a really nice print. Somewhere the OSX 10.3 software is the weak link... I am going to try Gimp Print 4.3.25 and will let you all know if I get better results.

Thanks for the info Kevin. I printed out a test page from each JetDirect Server. The JetDirect EX Plus shows itself as 0.0.0.0?? and the Jet Direct 300X shows 192.0.0.192. I am running computer with two ethernet cards that works with a software router (Vicomsoft) to split a single DSL line to the office. This was before the new router boxes came out and it seems to work pretty well still. It can serve DHCP but I can only specifiy what range of numbers and unfortunately it won't show me what numbers have been assigned. All the Macs in the office have fixed IPs and don't get served so the JetDirect should be the only thing asking for an IP but it doesn't seem to be working. Do you know how to set the JetDirect to a fixed IP that it will remember when the power goes out? It would be really helpful - thanks.

Thanks for the info. We are also now on Panther but can only plot from the OS9 machines. We were running a JetDirect EX Plus (HP part number 2591A) which apparently had no assignable IP number. Now we have upgraded to a JetDirect 300X which has a standard IP address of 192.0.0.192. Our typical numbers for machines in the office are 192.168.1.xx We bought it because I understood that it had a web interface and the IP address and other specs could be changed through a browser. Turns out if I follow the only instructions I have from HP to configure it and I enter the JetDirect IP number in a browser, I get a browser message saying that "Macintosh OS is not supported to run this application." So I followed your instructions and under IP printing I have a choice of "Rendevouz", "Internet Printing Protocol", "LPD/LPR", or "socket/JetDirect". None of the four work with the IP address of 192.0.0.192 but the JetDirect option notes that it is trying to communicate with 192.0.0.192 on port 631...and then gives up. I am really stuck here so any and all help would be appreciated. Do you think the problem is the IP address??

HI - I saw your post on the Macintosh to the HP 455CA and we have been running OS9 printing from Vectorworks with no problems. We use an HP JetDirect print server in between the plotter and the network and we have an old copy of PowerPlot which makes us able to select directly from the chooser. The problem is that we have all moved to OSX and I am having trouble plotting to the HP 455CA over the network. I have tried programs like X-RIP as recommended on the Vectorworks site, but never had any success. Would you mind telling me how you are getting a plot from OSX to the HP plotter? Thanks!