Plotting problems with HP 450C plotter

[colinhorn]

Having used a plot house for some time, we decided to buy a plotter from Ebay (sorry HP) and got a great HP Designjet 450C. it works fine with Autocad but when we try to plot from VW11 the plot starts to plot fine then hangs and all three of the error lights come on. if we turn the machine off and on again it will print a test print fine from XP but each time a VW drawing is tried it fails.

Any ideas anyone?

Many thanks

Colin

[Guest]

Colin,

The problem you are going to run into with this is lack of memory in this plotter. It's an older plotter that isn't able to be upgraded to a good level of memory.

There may be a few options you have, nonetheless.

One is to make sure you have the latest driver installed and it's not the autocad only driver.

Second, if you are using a newer version of VW (unclear by the post), check mark rasterize print output.

If these options still don't work, please be sure to include the version of VW and plotter driver version you are using.

[colinhorn]

Thanks for your prompt answer Katie.

We downloaded the XP driver yesterday from the HP site and use VW11. By chance I ordered a 32mb memory module for the plotter this afternoon so with luck this might work long term but I'll certainly try the rasterizing output in the short term.

Will let you know how I get on

Colin

[Kevin]

I have the 455CA. It works fine on the Mac using GimpPrint. I tell you this to give you hope. However, I have no idea of how the Windows side works.

[colinhorn]

Kevin

thanks for your message, I too have hope, I think it might be my print settings in Vectorworks, not having had a plotter before I'm not sure what the settings should, if i save a document to PDF first, it prints out fine it's just the direct from VW routine that is not working. I'll let you know how I get on once the memory has arrived and been fitted.

Colin

[Thom]

Under your printing preferences setup box for your driver - 'Advance' tab, Process document - check in computer. This will allow the printer driver to use computer memory instead of the plotter memory. Will slow down printing, but has allowed me to keep from upgrading plotter memory.

[colinhorn]

Now that sounds like a plan, wil definately try that, thanks!

Colin