remote plotting

[danj0nes]

Hello, I have 5 CAD seats on my network and one plotter. This setup is fine as generally speaking it is very rare that more than one seat will want to plot at the same time.

What I have noticed though is printing a series of layouts can take a seat 30minutes which means that Acad can't be used.

I was wondering if there is anyway I could get the file server to do the number crunching and thus leave the PC to work?

I know there are things such as batch plot but the file server is 2 floors below and doesn't have an acad licence.

Just wondered if anyone had any ideas?

Thanks
Dan :)

[hendie]

that seems an excessive amount of time to take for plotting. it shouldn't take more than a couple of seconds for each layout.

what amount of RAM does your plotter have ? I'd look at increasing the plotter RAM or isn't there a setting somewhere that lets you use the PC's RAM instead ? (I can'r remember it off hand)

[danj0nes]

Its an HP450c with 12mb RAM, thats seems to be ok to me?

The layouts do take a couple of seconds but when I add construction notes it slows it down. I have tried to use standard autocad fonts but they look poor.

[hendie]

are you spooling the plots or plotting directly to the plotter ?

[danj0nes]

The plotter is set to spool?

Dan

[hendie]

other than suggesting to make sure you have the latest drivers I'm not sure what else to try.
like you say, it must be the fonts but if you don't like them, then, you don't like 'em !

have you tried plotting the same drawing twice ~ once using your chosen font and once changing the text style to use an acad font like Romans ? and see what the difference is in plotting times.

are you using anything like Jetdirect for your plotting ?

[danj0nes]

Yes, the plotter is on a print server, The only thingI can think of doing is somehow using the file server to plot the drawings? After all the drawings are stored on that computer anyway?

Thanks
Dan