printing to OCE printers

[Seena Hassouna]

I live in a non Mac or VW friendly state. Boise ID.

The only place I can get plots is a shop with an OCE printer. They only cost about $1 /per page. The problem is, I have to convert my drawings to PDF's to get them to print. Does VW have any way to print to this machine. The print beureau says the OCE will only accept .PLT, .PDF, and Tiff group 2 files. Please help

This PDF conversion usually works but not always. Sometimes they get a post script error.

One thing that is consistently bad is that any line with a given lineweight when drawn horizontally or vertically has a slightly thinner lineweight when drawn on a diagonal. My boss really hates this. Any ideas??

Thanks,

Seena

[CipesDesign]

Just a thought: Why doesn't your boss by a plotter? It will pay for itself fairly quickly!

The diagonal line thickness problem can (usually) be cured by checking the "rasterize output" checkbox in the VectorWorks PULLDOWN TAB of the PRINT DIALOG window. I have never tried it with a PDF, but it may be worth a try...

[Seena Hassouna]

I agree. Buying the plotter would be the easiest option of all.

thanks,

Seena

[Drake]

If you are running OS X you can make a change to your system via the terminal...it will fix the fat line issue which has to do with the 'square pen' issue. Imagine a pen which has a square nib, vertical and horizontal lines will be the width or heigth of the square...deviate from horizonatal or vertiacl and the width of the line will be anywhere up to the diagonal width of the square.

What followes is a cut and paste from elswhere on this forum:

After some searching around on the GIMP site I found the following information that fixes the problem.

"If you want to return to using the postscript loop you can use the terminal to set a default that will tell the 10.3.x print system to behave similarly to how things used to be in 10.2.x. Be aware that altering this setting may well affect all printer drivers on your system, and it may cause adobe acrobat to fail to print in certain circumstances. So, to make your legacy apps produce postscript, similarly to how they behaved in Jaguar, enter this command at a terminal prompt:

defaults write NSGlobalDomain com.apple.print.apple.pictwpstopdf YES

To return to the default "correct" behavior in Panther enter this command:

defaults write NSGlobalDomain com.apple.print.apple.pictwpstopdf NO"

This has worked for me.

[Grant M]

At my previous workplace we printed from macs over a PC network to an OCE TDS 400 using Vectorworks. We used the OCE printer description file (which from memeory can be downloaded from their website) to create a printer in the print centre.

Not sure how you would do this at a bureau , but if you had a laptop and knew the printer IP address it could work.

Or if you installed Vectorworks viewer at the bureau on a PC they may be able to generate .plt files

[jan15]

Can't you just download the drivers for their plotter from OCE and install it as a printer on your computer? And then print to it using the "Print to file" option, which should create the PLT file they said they need.

Of course, it still might have the disparity in diagonal lines. You might have to change the way you draw. I've never seen that on print-outs. Usually my diagonal lines look thicker on the screen, but they print out at the same thickness as the horizontal and vertical.