MacPlot and HP500

[Snowturtle]

I am trying to get MacPlot to run my new HP500 plotter and having poor luck. I didn't buy the Poscript plotter because MacPlot told me I didn't need to. Bad advice! Now they say that it will work if I buy a HPGL Accessory Card from HP. Does anyone know if I will get sufficient performance from my plotter this way or do I need to start over with the 500PS?

[PeterT]

In our office, we use MicroSpot's Ultra GraphicPak version 5.0 and we plot to an HP DesignJet 230 (non-Postscript) plotter with great results. We use the Raster driver however, not the HPGL2 driver. To get the plotter on our Ethernet network we are using an HP JetDirect EX Plus printer adapter. With this setup, each workstation plots direct to the plotter across the 10 Base T network.

If you use Microspot's direct connection rather than the HP network adapter, you are limited to the speed of the serial connection (or parallel, I think). Also, all plots must pass through the plotter server workstation to get to the plotter.

The only issue we have is with fonts. We are using Adobe Type Manager version 4.5.2, and we are forced to use the ATM preference setting "Preserve character shapes". If ATM is set to "Preserve line spacing", all the descenders are clipped from our plotted text. This is because our output is to a non PostScript device, which is briefly covered in the ATM documentation.

Hope this helps,

PeterT

[Snowturtle]

Thanks, that is exactly the type of info I'm looking for. HP told me that the poscript version is better for graphics, do you have any problems printing 3-D renderings with your setup?

[PeterT]

quote:

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Originally posted by Snowturtle:

Do you have any problems printing 3-D renderings with your setup?

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Unfortunately, we do not do much 3D work here, and our output is monochrome, not color, but I will say that the raster driver produces great results on both lines and fills, and we use all shades of grey for our fills and they are very smooth.

But the processing time of a plot is based on the number of objects in the drawing that need to be rasterized. I imagine 3D drawings would take longer to process simply because of the greater number of objects, but I don't know if a PostScript plotter would speed this up.