Plotting Gradient Fills Takes a loooooong time..

[stlcadmgr]

Gradient Fills are great and they look realy nice, but when we plot them out
it takes a really long time on our HP 1050c plotter. On our 11x17 color
laserjet 5500 they plot quickly (using PCL6 driver).

The gradient plan is basically a Colorized Site Plan, with different layers
of fill:
gradient green, up to property line.then gradient greys for asphalt paving
on top of that, then buildings in various gradient colors on top of that and
or gradient greens for grass islands or gradient lighter grays for
sidewalks, etc.

We are running Land Desktop 2005 with and without raster design 2005, on
Windows XP-Service Pack 2. The Print Server is Windows 2000 running the
latest driver for the HP device for 2005 (v4.66) pulled fomr the HP website

Any thoughts?

Thanks
Mark

[mjfarrell]

Ever try to move in a Volkswagen beetle?

I think the issue is the plotters maximum
through-put capability.

I don't know how one would convert typical plotter
performance of say inches per second to pages per minute
for a better comparison to those other devices.
You may be asking more of that workhorse than it
was bred to do.

[Glenn Pope]

The 1050 shouldn't be the problem. We have one and print out gradient hatching without a problem. Don't see any difference with or without the hatching.

Are you using a PC3 file for plotting or using the system driver?

[stlcadmgr]

After some further investigation I realized that the printer does not have an internal hard drive, when I thought it had. Having/not having an internal hard drive on these devices makes all the difference in the world when i comes to large prints.

There is a setting that affects how the print is spooled, "in computer" or "on printer".
These are found in the printing options, advanced tab on the HP optimized driver.

For larger prints...
The best settings for a Device with a hard drive is "on Printer"
The best settings for a Device without a hard drive is "on Computer"

I set it to On Computer and it printed right out. Granted this setting really taxes the computer sending the print, but it solved the problem and it printed it in a reasonable time.

Meamwhile, I have a Internal hard drive and an updated firmware in route...

Thanks for all of your suggestions.

Mark

[Glenn Pope]

We have the hard drive plus maxed out on RAM. So I guess that would make a difference ;-)