brudgers

A 24bit color image at 11x17 and 300dpi is about 50megs fully inflated...at 600dpi it's about 200megs.

C, I don't really need to closely calibrate the colors. I run a check print and adjust as needed. Printed color varies too much with media and device...besides I always want to change something after I print it. Calibrating all the components (printers, monitors, and scanners) just seems like more trouble...since I really only care about the printed output. [edit] With a standard monitor under standard lighting it is virtually impossible to correlate with printed output becuase the difference in the way the images are lit.

The realworld is neither RGB or CYMK...it's full of water vapor and dirt and it's really big compare to a sheet of paper...so accuracy in those terms is a fiction...and probably not what the planners want to see anyway. You can calibrate all your various pieces of hardware for consistency. And you can tightly specify the color of certain objects using standards such as RAL. But you can't accurately recreate the impact of a 20,000 sf facade on paper...even if your local government wants to pretend that this is possible. I would favor artistic vagueness over virtual reality. You're selling it to the planners anyway.

As mentioned what you see on the screen is RGB what you get from your printer is CYMK (typically...with a four color system, though many printers now have more colors). The printing process is dependent on paper type, that's why there are Pantone gamuts for both coated and uncoated stock. Pantone Process color is not CYMK...it uses 14 proprietary inks. CYMK gives a reasonable approximation of many process colors. Pantone also has a CYMK gamut that you could use to calibrate your printer...and some printers are Pantone certified to produce certain colors accurately. Unless you're doing work for print media, what you get out of the box is probably good enough for most applications...and if you're trying to do print media work using Vectorworks you probably deserve whatever results you get. The gamuts for RGB and CYMK are very different and therefore the range of colors which can be accurately produced by both is limited. If you're really intent on research just google up "color gamut" and enjoy.

If you think you will want it, I recommend just buying it. It will be easier to develop your workflow with all the tools in place.

I doubt it. I am finding it easier to manager window and door PIO's by creating symbols.

Memory in the printer. This has been the case with previous design jets when processing raster images. A small raster can be held in printer memory. However, with 24 bit colors a resolution of 300dpi each square inch of raster image requires .36 megabytes. 64megabytes will hold 237 square inches with no overhead...less than two square feet.(compression isn't an option since the printer memory would have to hold both the compressed data and the expanded image). Of course the Dj 130 uses 2400x1200dpi...a theoretical 8.64megs per square inch...entire memory holds less than 7.5 square inches. A 1/4" x 24" swath is 6 square inches. A 24x36 sheet is 864 square inches or 7.46 gigs (about 2 orders of magnitude larger than physical memory). 64 megs is enough for vector processing...which is the principle role of Designjets in most offices. It's also enough for processing rasters if you use the option in the printer driver to process the image in the computer. Remember the size of the image in the computer is unrelated to the amount of memory required to print it at a given size. Even a tiny gif is huge when converted to a full bleed raster. All of the communication with the printer passes through the standard windows printer interface. It doesn't anticipate the radical out of memory conditions common with large format printers. HP's drivers and firmware are optimized to handle the normal situtation (hpgl 2/vector) plotting without delay through the OS. Where memory management is critical, they offer the fairy robust software solution of processing the file on the computer. Or the hardware option of a printer with lot$ of memory.

The second jet direct box connects into the parallel port...I don't know if Macs come with these. For the external print server, you may need a driver on your computer...check the manufacturer's site. The internal jetdirect card should show up on your network, but the fact that the other guy was using an external server may mean that the interal card is bad. You can get a used/refurbished one online for less than $100 last time I checked. Gutenprint is some sort of Mac driver http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net/ Again, I don't know much about Macs...

If beige is acceptable, and you don't plan on using xp64 or vista64 a refurbished hp750c is a good machine... www.cesplot.com If you're running vista32 then you can add winline for compatibility www.winline.com Then again, I've been accused of being cheap.

Eyedropper? Just a guess.

Using VW2008 my viewport borders don't print. However, if I use a clipping rectangle, it will print unless I adjust its class or attributes.

No problem. From the board, I've gathered there are still some features that have difficulty with a 64bit OS...

Using space objects and a worksheet linked to them is my recommendation. Vectorworks Architect Step by Step has a reasonable overview. I suspect ArchonCad does as well...

If only walls would allow compound cross sections...like base boards, chair rails, etc. It's one of the things I really miss from ADT.

Disclaimer: I'll qualify my postion as relating primarily to US practice, but reserve the right to point out that US practice was a large part of the context in which O'Flaherty's comments were made. If you look at software tailored to large firms, it's compartmentalized...how many flavors of revit do you need to model all the systems in a simple building? 3 - Architecture, MEP, and Structural. Add land development desktop to model the site. Add Autocad to handle the 2d work. And add Impression to handle the presentations. That's what listening to CAD managers gets you...$20,000+ worth of software...and a rack of servers... No problem if you're big enough to employ a full time CAD manager or two. Sure some big firms care about output, and some small firms don't. But architects in big firms are far less likely to operate autonomously and vertically. And this is reflected in the products targeted at those markets. I've worked in large firms and small firms and with a varitety of software. There are tradeoffs in using Vectorworks, the postitives are flexible workflow and superior graphical byproducts of that workflow...the downside is that it is not nearly as rock solid reliable and many architectural objects are mediocre. Flexible workflow is antithetical to the employment of CAD managers...and poor graphical output is more readily accepted by such people. Again the Disclaimer: I'll qualify my postion as relating primarily to US practice, but reserve the right to point out that US practice was a large part of the context in which O'Flaherty's comments were made.

One mb ram? A whole gb isn't enough if you're running Renderworks...you need two per Nemetchek. A fragmented or corrupt disk can also contribute to these types of problems. I would recommend running checkdisk and defrag on all drives if you haven't very recently. I suspect it's more OS related than application related. Since it's happening with two different cards I doubt it's a video hardware fault.

Maybe you see the big firm strategy for growth as strengthening the influence of small firms. But that's not consistent with my experience. Or with the statements about the reasons for changing the release cycle. Was anyone around here complaining that they weren't paying for upgrades often enough? Don't get me wrong, it may increase Nemetchek's revenue stream and be sound business practice...but features like dual rendering veiwports and sketch modes aren't the sort of things CAD managers demand.

The whole first page was about how Nemetchek plans to market itself to big companies as a big company. It describes a strategy where they will talk less to architects and more to CAD managers. Page two is about opacity. Do you think CAD managers care about that?

They're changing the entire development cycle to meet the priority of CAD managers. That's pretty substantial. And that probably means that small firms will be on a yearly upgrade cost cycle rather than every 18 months. Will you be surprised if the upgrade price doesn't drop?

If Nemetchek focuses future development on the large firm market and the wishes of CAD managers (like ADSK), that's likely to occur at the expense of small firms like mine. So in the long run, why would I stick with them? I have a PC, and therefore options.

Computer Rendering is a craft. It takes time to learn. Yes there are tricks. But it all requires patience. One trick is not to constantly try to produce high resolution final quality images while you are working...using lower resolution and lower quality rendering allows working out the problems more quickly.

Focus on CAD/IT managers is bad. Maybe I'll wind up back with Autodesk.

Running out of memory can cause a Designjet to hang. Set the windows driver to process the plot in the computer rather than the printer...This is particularly important with a graphics file on a low end Designjet.

You've lost them right there.

Latest version is 1.7 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pdf