Printing Survey

[Cathy Hadley]

I need to find out what other firms are using for their Revit printing jobs.

I have a firm that is having lots of *issues* plotting to an OCE TS400 (I believe). I've read through the posts and we have tried all kinds of different drivers, settings, etc...

The question that came up today is... OKAY if we can't get the OCE to work correctly, what would be a better choice? What is everyone else printing to? and how? If PDF... what about batch printing?

So if you could take a moment and jot down what large format printer set up you use with Revit and are getting consistently good results?

Forever Grateful
CZH

[BWG]

I need to find out what other firms are using for their Revit printing jobs.

I have a firm that is having lots of *issues* plotting to an OCE TS400 (I believe). I've read through the posts and we have tried all kinds of different drivers, settings, etc...

The question that came up today is... OKAY if we can't get the OCE to work correctly, what would be a better choice? What is everyone else printing to? and how? If PDF... what about batch printing?

So if you could take a moment and jot down what large format printer set up you use with Revit and are getting consistently good results?

Forever Grateful
CZH

Both my HP 500 and KIP 6000 STF (competitor to the OCE)

[funkman]

HP500 works seemlessly for us

[aaronrumple]

We have big issues printing to our Xerox 8830. Lines are being shifted all over.

Right now this is what I'm doing:
http://forums.augi.com/showthread.php?t=23733&highlight=acrobat

[sohocad]

We are using Oce TDS600 with stardard oce driver and it print fine...using both the "Print console software" and PDF...for batch plotting of PDF we normally combined the set into one big PDF and send it to the plotter which we find is the fastest or send the PDF set through the Print console software which come with the TDS600...I known some company which use HP Designjet driver for TDS printer....which work well too.

[dnilsson]

We use an Oce' 9600 and only got it to work by reverting to the oldest driver we could find, version 1.1 or something. All the new drivers were incompatible.

[BillyGrey]

Designjet 500
Flawless performance.

[BomberAIA]

I print everything to a PDF. Then I send it to the printer. I also print directly to a HP 110. PDF's work great. I've also used DWF's.

[kshawks]

We use the HP Design Jet 450C for large scale & Desk jet 1220C for small scale format. We do use the computers memory in lieu of the printer memory a little slow but no problems so far.

[gbrowne]

Designjet 800, also flawless.

[bclarch]

HP DesignJet 750C+ (A-E). Works fine for line drawings. I recently ran into problems when trying to print elevations in "shading with edges" mode with shadows on. The last few inches of the right side of the sheet didn't print. Some sort of memory issue I suspect. Switching to "use computer memory" didn't solve the problem. I resorted to printing only one elevation per sheet as a work around. Haven't had time to try fiddling with it any further. As a matter of fact, if anyone has any suggestions I'm all ears.

[Andre Baros]

We plot through a service bureau to a TDS 400 in house and a bunch of OCE 9600's remotely. Never a problem. For billing and archive purposes, all our files are printed to PDF first and then processed through Apprentice. We had an HP before the TDS and find the OCE machine itself to be much more reliable. It took much longer to set up the HP, but one set up, neither machine had driver issues.

For batch plotting we use the old Revit PDF driver. When problems come up, we plot that sheet through Adobe Acrobat (but I'm going to implement Steve's Acrobat Distiller method soon). For test plots and in house sketch sheets we plot to PLT first because it's a bit faster and then when we're cleaning up a project, we only save the PDF's and know that we can just trash the PLT's.

I can't recommend enough the benefit of going through service bureau, it's faster, more reliable, and cheaper than doing it all in house. This was not true of the first 2 places we tried, but I would never change our current setup.

[Damo]

We use the HP Design Jet 450C for large scale & Desk jet 1220C for small scale format. We do use the computers memory in lieu of the printer memory a little slow but no problems so far.Similar set-up here. DesignJet 450 (begining to show its age) and DeskJet 1220C

[gibson.tim]

Large Format: HP DesignJet 1050C with the HPGL2 Driver. The postscript driver setup doesn't work well for us.

Small Format: HP LaserJet 8150

Colour: HP Color LaserJet 8550

DWF works pretty good for us as well, except I'm having an issue with a font "growing" on the title block and covering a nearby filled region when printing to DWF, but not to an other printer or format.

Other than the small DWF issue, everything works well.

[John Anderson]

DesignJet 800 -no problems.

The new 8.1 CD has an "Known Issues" paper that lists the OCE as having problems with Revit.
"OCE print driver may cause problems on printing. Better results may be obtained by

first printing to PDF or DWF and then printing to the plotter."

[Wes Macaulay]

The new 8.1 CD has an "Known Issues" paper that lists the OCE as having problems with Revit.


"OCE print driver may cause problems on printing. Better results may be obtained by first printing to PDF or DWF and then printing to the plotter."

Interesting. Many OCE devices have been problematic for Revit since I can remember. So many of their drivers don't seem to work properly with Revit.

[todd.69291]

We use a Oce TSD600 (Oce 9600) and just download and installed

oce_TDS_wrd332 (Raster Driver).zip (This file will contain the TSD400 files)

It seems to work fine after I ran the setup.exe. Before I just tried updating the driver and it would crash. So use the setup.exe. We also have had no problem with

oce_TDS600-9600_wrd27_us.

Good luck.

[Skisouth]

Plotting service - they have two OCE 9800's. Plot HPGL2 using OCE 9400 configuration, zip and send. No issues.

[sbrown]

I gave up on paper long ago and just send dwfs and pdfs to everyone. LOL.

[Cathy Hadley]

Thanks for all who replied. Very informative.

I know PDF's work for them, so we will try that distiller method and see how it goes.

And Scott.... dreamer.

CZH

[Scott Davis]

Interesting. Many OCE devices have been problematic for Revit since I can remember. So many of their drivers don't seem to work properly with Revit.
Isn't Oce an Autodesk "Partner"?? C'mon OCE!

[LarryG]

Our in house printers are a KIP 7000 and KIP 6000 for in-house production plotting and an HP 5500PS for presentation color. We typically do not have problems plotting directly to any of these devices. For batch plotting, we use the Revit PDF writer and use the KIP Print Request application to send the jobs - works great. Our reprographic service provider uses KIP 8000's and has no problem with our PDF's.

I don't think we have had issues with R8 but we have in the past had to use "raster printing" rather than "vector printing" to solve some issues.

I understand that the Revit PDF Writer application is no longer available with the Revit downloads. I am a big fan of DWF's but my repro service is not so we still do PDF. If Autodesk can work with Oce and KIP to make ReproDesk and PrintRequest support DWF, we'll all be happy and I'll buy alot of DWF Composer.

[DaveP]

We have an Oce TDS600 in-house.

Used to use the Oce driver 2.8.2 & now use version 3.3.2. With 2.8.2, the screening isn't real great, but we never had any problems with it. With version 3.3.2, everything looks great.

Haven't tried it on 8.1 yet, though...

[janunson]

We have big issues printing to our Xerox 8830. Lines are being shifted all over.


UGH!!, the 8830, we got rid of ours thank god. It sucked! we had big issues printing to the 8830 from ANY software.

we use an Oce TDS 6600, printing files to PDF and then sending through the management software. Also an HP1050C and HP2600 and an HP120

[cphubb]

We print to 755CM with no problem. We also print to PS using the driver edit in Freehand and then print. Using high raster quality is great. Line drawings use vector and standard HP driver.

For service bureau we just us pdf. I think they are using an OCE. Had some problems with .plt drawings from Revit and the OCE printers. Lineweights were all off. PDF fixed the problem and sped up our printing process greatly.

[Tom Weir]

Cathy
We use a Xerox 6050 with a HP DesignJet 750C+ (A-E) driver. I would say we have pretty good results, though it took awhile to get a good driver. I also suggest using an HPGL2 driver (if you can do that on an OCE).

Tom Weir
Los Angeles

[mlgatzke]

We use a:

Xerox 8825 that works fine for linework. Lots of views on a sheet using Advanced Graphics is a problem - probably memory related.

HP LaserJet 8000DN. Never had a problem.

(Home) HP DeskJet 1120C. A nice option for a meager price.

[Wes Macaulay]

Plotting service - they have two OCE 9800's. Plot HPGL2 using OCE 9400 configuration, zip and send. No issues.We've got a LOT of Oce 9800s out here -- what is this Oce9400 driver that you use? When we send HP-GL2 (usually using the Windows driver for the HP750C, the last plotter of theirs that used more or less a vanilla version of HP-GL2) the linework is too light. So we have people cranking out PDFs or DWFs, which is at least a slight hassle for most print shops.

[Shaun v Rooyen]

We have got the OCE 9400-II and a few old HP750's. The only issues we have had is the "Vector-Raster" processing out of Revit's print dialogue. Vector processing seems to leave out a few things.
We have recently had some huge issues, trying to print coloured A0 floor finishes to the Epson Stylus 9600. A1 and smaller no problem. A0 produces a "runtime error" and kindly shuts Revit down for you????? Strangely you could get 2 or 3 thru' then the "RT" error. There after nothing will print from Revit on that PC to the Epson. Now it's not the Printer, our graphics department puts some HUGE stuff thru' to it. Any ideas?

[Lashers]

I am using an HP800, it works great!

[khomburg]

We have 3 or 4 different models of HP plotters that all work well. But we also use an OCE TDS300 that we use the Print Exec software from OCE to send PDFs and that works great.