Printing Woes!

[Jon Souter]

One of my users is having some difficulties printing to one of our trusty printers, from a Windows copy of VectorWorks. The printer supports various printer languages, but they favour PostScript, since this driver allows them to resize the output to fit various paper sizes.

They have the correct (latest) drivers, which work with all other Windows applications without problem.

However, when printing from VectorWorks, they are using the driver to resize the output to fit onto A3 paper (for proofing) by using the scaling options provided inside the PostScript driver.

They find that at a scale factor of 30% the output is a little too large - but perfect in rendition. As soon as they attempt a smaller scale-factor (i.e. 25%) the print becomes badly corrupted - the whole image becomes obscured by lines and random dots.

Has anybody seen this before? Is there a workaround - like can the print be automatically scaled by VectorWorks rather than by the printer driver?

Please help - my user is getting frustrated!

p.s. The printer supports HPGL / PCL5e / PCL6 /Adobe PostScript 3

Thanks in advance.

Jon Souter

[jnr]

What version? If you are using 9.01 go to print setup and scale the drawing in the lower left hand corner of the setup menu. If you are using 8.5 the only work around is to save your work first, then rescale the layer, change the print area, print, then do not save to restore the drawing to its original size. The other trick is to workgroup reference the layers to anthor file and scale the referenced layers to the size of the sheet you would like to print to. The latter method preserves the print setup for use as a check plot and is automatically updated from the root file. Good luck

[Matthew Giampapa]

Jon,

What model printer is this? I will try to reproduce it here, but this sound's like a driver problem. If at all possible, try printing to a postscript file and using a postscript viewer to look at the output (Ghost Script is a good free viewer).

Matthew Giampapa

Technical Support

quote:

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Originally posted by Jon Souter:

One of my users is having some difficulties printing to one of our trusty printers, from a Windows copy of VectorWorks. The printer supports various printer languages, but they favour PostScript, since this driver allows them to resize the output to fit various paper sizes.

They have the correct (latest) drivers, which work with all other Windows applications without problem.

However, when printing from VectorWorks, they are using the driver to resize the output to fit onto A3 paper (for proofing) by using the scaling options provided inside the PostScript driver.

They find that at a scale factor of 30% the output is a little too large - but perfect in rendition. As soon as they attempt a smaller scale-factor (i.e. 25%) the print becomes badly corrupted - the whole image becomes obscured by lines and random dots.

Has anybody seen this before? Is there a workaround - like can the print be automatically scaled by VectorWorks rather than by the printer driver?

Please help - my user is getting frustrated!

p.s. The printer supports HPGL / PCL5e / PCL6 /Adobe PostScript 3

Thanks in advance.

Jon Souter

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[Guest]

Dear Jon Souter:

Along with the information Matthew provided, might I make a suggestion? One of the features of VectorWorks 9.x is the "Print Current View" option. What this will allow users to do is completely throw out the old concept of scaling in many cases. No matter what size you have drawn, simply zoom to the extents of your drawing, select the "Print Current View", your paper size and printer/plotter. What is in the current view will print to the paper size selected. I.e., if you have drawn to a C size and want to print to E size, it will. If you draw to C and want to print to A, it will. To me, this seems to be the most effective option.

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Brian O

Nemetschek North America

Technical Support Specialist