KIP plotting issues

[matthewh.104177]

Has anyone had problems plotting to a KIP from Revit? There are some printing issues listed in Revit's help menu but not our specific one. Anything we send to the KIP prints out way too light. We're using Revit's default plot widths and it looks great on our other printers. I don't want to mess with the KIP's settings since most the office still uses CAD.

Any ideas?

[stuntmonkee]

If you are plotting directly to your KIP, then you are ahead of us. . . .

What printer do you have. We have the KIP 3000, and have to plot everything to a DWF, and then send that DWF to the KIP with request.

But I would be interested in chatting with someone else that has one of these. . . .we arent having the best of luck, so maybe you are.

[davidwlight]

Hi, we have just installed a KIP 3000 printer at our office & it prints fine from both Autocad and Revit 8.1. Although we are having issues with paper sizes! The technician who installed the machine didn't have a clue about how to install windows xp drivers, so they had to send another person a few days later. Loading the drivers doesn't seem that straight forward compared with other plotters that I have used. The drivers have been updated a number of times already & I understand that there is a new release ready now, although I haven't tried them yet, you may want to check the website. Print quality seems fine & reasonably quick, however shaded elevations seem to take their time. The tone quality for linework is ok; have you called Kip or your supplier to ask whether it is a software issue or hardware one? Do you get the same problems when printing from Autocad? For your information the driver version that I am using is July 4th 2005 17.29.15.

[matthewh.104177]

We have the KIP 2000. It prints fine with autocad, and is way faster than our wideformat HP, which is why I'd like to get some decent quality output with Revit too. I don't know what driver I have or how to find out. We'll probably have to get someone in to look at the problem.

[matthewh.104177]

About the shaded elevations, ours take a long time too. I've heard it's best to shut off hidden worksets and/or model categories as well as turn on the far clipping. Haven't tested that yet though.

[BWG]

We have a KIP 6000. It prints fine with the exception of halftone. Halftone comes out way too light and we haven't been able to fix that problem yet, so it is not used often. As for installing the drivers, the KIP 6000 drivers are on the controller and we just browse the network and chose powerprint and it will drop down the KIP 6000, then it will install the correct drivers from there into XP. If you want to track prints, you have to set it up manually each time in the print er properties. We are using the Powerprint 5.5 SR4 release. We haven't gotten the 6.0 release yet and may not as it was developed with the KIP 3000. Would be nice to have the DWF option for scan to file though.

Keep in mind that you have to set up your line weights for each scale you are printing to. This has bitten us a few times.

[tect75]

we have the 30 here and on of the problems we have is in tone differences between existing and new construction. before the change to the kip existing always printed a shade lighter than the new construction. now with the kip its the opposite. made no changes other than the printer.

[stuntmonkee]

Hi, we have just installed a KIP 3000 printer at our office & it prints fine from both Autocad and Revit 8.1. Although we are having issues with paper sizes! The technician who installed the machine didn't have a clue about how to install windows xp drivers, so they had to send another person a few days later. Loading the drivers doesn't seem that straight forward compared with other plotters that I have used. The drivers have been updated a number of times already & I understand that there is a new release ready now, although I haven't tried them yet, you may want to check the website. Print quality seems fine & reasonably quick, however shaded elevations seem to take their time. The tone quality for linework is ok; have you called Kip or your supplier to ask whether it is a software issue or hardware one? Do you get the same problems when printing from Autocad? For your information the driver version that I am using is July 4th 2005 17.29.15.

Are you printing both Raster & Vector information?

[gwnelson]

We have a 2000 and have found that making PDF first & then plotting from Adobe to KIP as the printer gives the best resolution (and not too bad shading). Although the extra step of PDF might seem to be a burden, it gives us the opportunity to distribute PDF's as attachments & get things out faster.

[bimologist]

We have a KIP 6000. It prints fine with the exception of halftone. Halftone comes out way too light and we haven't been able to fix that problem yet, so it is not used often. As for installing the drivers, the KIP 6000 drivers are on the controller and we just browse the network and chose powerprint and it will drop down the KIP 6000, then it will install the correct drivers from there into XP. If you want to track prints, you have to set it up manually each time in the print er properties. We are using the Powerprint 5.5 SR4 release. We haven't gotten the 6.0 release yet and may not as it was developed with the KIP 3000. Would be nice to have the DWF option for scan to file though.

Keep in mind that you have to set up your line weights for each scale you are printing to. This has bitten us a few times.
If your KIP 6000 has XP embeded already loaded then the cost to upgrade to 6.0 for DWF compatibility is the cost of shipping the CD to you,

If you do not have XP then it will cost you something.

[matthewh.104177]

We've tried printing to PDF first too, and then sending it to the KIP from the adobe reader, but it gives similar results.

[BWG]

If your KIP 6000 has XP embeded already loaded then the cost to upgrade to 6.0 for DWF compatibility is the cost of shipping the CD to you,

If you do not have XP then it will cost you something.

Our KIP 6000 is NT 4.0 controller. Didn't know they had one with XP, unless it is the printer drivers only.

[davidwlight]

Are you printing both Raster & Vector information?Stuntmonkee,

I'm am able to print both raster and vector formats successfully.

[davidwlight]

I have also uploaded screen grabs of all our settings, which may be of use. It was on an NT network, but we have recently implemented windows 2003 server, however the printer is a standalone printer, with its own static IP address so the server has no involvement with the printer at all.

[bimologist]

I see that you have KIP GL. The KIP GL in AutoCAD is supposed to get teh pen weights FROM the application. I..e the file gets the penweights embeded in the PLOT FILE. I take maybe the penweights are not being embebded by revit. try calling your Dealer , our is pretty decent , unfortunnately they just got bought out by American Repro. but they still have the same guys, they are pretty good about fixing something. Unfortunately there is no DIRECT contant with KIP #$%$#% tech support, that is the biggest issue I have with them. Why cant I call the tech support guy directly, have to go through my dealer. in any case we were having issues with PDF files that were generated with Pushbutton PDF and newer that use transparency, in any case they sent us just a PSCRIPT.EXE file updated , now twice. It took me a while to figure out what in the world the KIP GL is. it did not used to be an issue , then they added this feature.
I would get your dealer involved since there is no direct support from KIP , not they have ANY help on the KIP JL feature.

[thomasf]

We just got the KIP 3000 and have a few minor problems when plotting form AutoCAD and major problmes plotting from RevIt 9.1. I have to plot a drawing to scale on the KIP. Can anybody share with me what settigns they use when plotting to the KIP from RevIt 9.1.

Thanks

[jwilhelm]

I have had to adjust my printer prefernces for the KIP to get good halftones, go to printers, KIP,properties, printing preferences, Halftone color adjustment: here you can adjust the various parameters, brightness, contrast etc

[justin.126675]

We had a rep from KIP America come in a few weeks ago because we could not print at all from Revit to our KIP 3000. They are currently working on a new driver that will allow us to print from Revit.

[Michael Coviello]

I'm following this thread because i am about to sign a contract for a KIP5000. Anyone using this model?

[rgesner]

We are replacing our two KIP 6000s with OCE 700s, partly because of this.

[whotch]

We installed a KIP 5000 in April. The furnished driver would only print Revit images to fit as ThomasF mentioned but it was fine with AutoCAD 2007. We (painfully) uninstalled the driver and installed the year-old driver which works for Revit 9 and ACAD 2007 but the highly touted billing function was not available.

Last week I got a new driver from KIP that should address the problem although it "hasn't been tested" by the OEM. I'll post an update when I get it installed.

Bimologist: we sorted out the light lineweight issue in the Revit software instead of tinkering with the KIP settings because ACAD was plotting okay.

[cilg]

How did you resolve the light halftone issue when plotting to the KIP? Is there a halftone adjustment setting in Revit?

[papamac65]

To All,
If you were using HP emulation in your plot styles originally (BEFORE KIP) then you need to change the "percentage of shade" on your CTB or STB files

Ours went from a 50% shade to a 30% shade and everthing works fine.

I have another problem though. I can plot to our Kip 3000 just fine from Vanilla 2008 but can't from MEP 2008. Any thoughts???

[matthom]

We have a new 5000, it has nice speed, but we cannot print some PDFs and our 3D images from AutoCAD 2009 are unusable! Support from two of our local dealers has not yet fixed the problems. We are basically limping through our workdays plotting on an old color HP1050.