Outside printing/plotting company blues

[Cadfused]

I'm working on an issue where-as for a small job or for a couple sets of Architectural drawings, we will print in-house and the prints come out looking great. An ongoing issue we have had is with the prints that come from our outsourced print company. Though we send them the same pdf or plt file that we print in-house, there are certain color numbers that their system prints totally wrong and we lose that consistency and shading. there are about 5 specific colors (at this point) that i know are issues to our outsourced company's system. I could go through and change those specific line colors to different colors that may print identical but i would have to create 256 lines and make them all 256 ctb colors and print in-house and through the our printing company and compare each one for identical shading and thickness, and by then i would be ready to use the out-house. (sorry, bad humor there).

The printing company uses their program to tone back the line types to bring out the shading and that works to some extent but you lose the crispness of some of the lines that way and there are some, such as brick or cmu lines in building elevations that just come out looking worse than before.

The person at the printing company felt it is an issue with us using a shareware pdf creator and not using the authentic adobe program to create our pdf's. Our in-house IT person begs to differ and says there was a magazine article trumping that theory. Another thought the person had was that we were using old drivers but our IT person says we are using newer drivers than what the person said we would need. This also doesn't explain why our PLT files print the same way. Items that should come out gray or shaded come out totally black or very dark. it is as if the print company's system strips out the shadings that are encoded in the plt or pdf's we create in-house. I'm charged with trying to find a solution so that when we send our pdf's or plots to this company, the prints come out pretty well identical to what we print in-house.

have any of you run into this issue and been able to fix it or might have some ideas that i have not been able to come up with. Thank you.

[rustysilo]

Are you using the drivers for your printer or their printer?

 

When we were outsourcing our big print jobs we had to install the driver for the printing company's printer and this worked well.

[Cadfused]

Let me ask you, though. When you installed the same drivers as the printing company, did you have to rework your ctb or stb pen settings to work for their systems or was there no changing needed in pen settings? I was told a couple possibilities by the print company, one being that we would need the actual Adobe program and not a shareware pdf creator. Another was that we should update our printer drivers but, speaking with our IT person, our drivers are actually more current than the printing firm....and maybe that is where the problem may lie.

Please let me know what, if anything, you had to do with your ctb's or stb's in changing them with implementing the drivers. I'm trying to steer clear of changing them as management is pleased with how the in-house prints come out. I would prefer not having to reinvent the wheel if possible. Thanks for the information. I appreciate it.

[Strix]

would a short and simple way to find out if it's an Adobe solution to be to send a pdf somewhere that has Adobe Acrobat and send that to the print company? if it works, it works, if it doesn't, you've saved the price of Acrobat

 

does Acrobat have a trial version?

[Cadfused]

would a short and simple way to find out if it's an Adobe solution to be to send a pdf somewhere that has Adobe Acrobat and send that to the print company? if it works, it works, if it doesn't, you've saved the price of Acrobat

 

does Acrobat have a trial version?

 

That is a process i'm trying to get our IT person working on. He had loaded the Adobe drivers on my system but it wasn't set up to handle printing to a paper size of 30x42. I'm going to be trying to tinker with it to see if there is a way to set parameters in the Adobe that will let me print to something larger than 11x17. Our IT person just simply told me it wasn't configured to handle our full sized sheets and then left so...as the old adage goes, if you want something done, you have to figure it out yourself or take it to a site like this.

Yes, i'm trying to go through the easy options to try and dispute but everything has to go through IT and that can become much like government.....it will take a long time of deliberation before anything gets past.

[rustysilo]

Let me ask you, though. When you installed the same drivers as the printing company, did you have to rework your ctb or stb pen settings to work for their systems or was there no changing needed in pen settings?

Nope. We installed their drivers and used our typical pen table as I recall. We printed to .plt as opposed to .pdf and the prints looked perfect.

 

I would recommend installing their drivers and printing to .plt. If you don't have a .plt viewer there is a great one for free called BitView which is awesome for checking your .plt's to be sure they look right before sending to the printing co.

 

Ultimately we ended up buying a Xerox 6204 Wide Format which is one more kick @$$ printer. We no longer oursource any large format printing and we are able to easily recoup printing costs by charging the client what we would have paid the printing place ± to run them for us. Not to mention it is much more efficient to do them in-house as we do not have to wait for the printing place to get to our order, print them, then deliver them.

[rustysilo]

Btw, you should be able to add larger sheet sizes in your Adobe printer settings under properties > Advanced Properties (if I remember right - this is standard for most all printer setups) > Custom Paper Sizes.

[Cadfused]

Nope. We installed their drivers and used our typical pen table as I recall. We printed to .plt as opposed to .pdf and the prints looked perfect.

 

I would recommend installing their drivers and printing to .plt. If you don't have a .plt viewer there is a great one for free called BitView which is awesome for checking your .plt's to be sure they look right before sending to the printing co.

 

Ultimately we ended up buying a Xerox 6204 Wide Format which is one more kick @$$ printer. We no longer oursource any large format printing and we are able to easily recoup printing costs by charging the client what we would have paid the printing place ± to run them for us. Not to mention it is much more efficient to do them in-house as we do not have to wait for the printing place to get to our order, print them, then deliver them.

 

I was afraid you were going to tell me that you had to print .plt's. I was told as much from the printing company but when that option was given to my bosses, they were less than thrilled about the idea as other firms would not readily be able to open the .plt file as they can with a pdf. Though, with this .plt viewer, that may allow for some give in doing so.

 

We use the speedy Xerox 8830. It gets about 10 minutes to the printed page in terms of speed. I already know i have a better chance of talking the company into investing in a slightly used rock than them upgrading to a speed beast like you're using.

 

As for the Adobe issue in adding a size, i toyed with it for close to an hour, yesterday, trying to import .pc's and .pc2's of the 30x42 size nature and it won't permitted it. Our IT person has an email into the agent that supplies us with our AutoCAD to find out what is needed. The tooth grinding continues.

 

Thank you for replying back and letting me know what you had to do. It is still an option that we may still have to fall back on even if it doesn't get the best response from the employees and management.

[Strix]

well, at least some input from some 'experts' who've been there, done that, and got ink on their t-shirts might help in the persuasion :wink:

[Cadfused]

That is my process of thought. Here's to hoping.

 

(my Nerd thought of the day)

I have to admit, this is probably one of the best things that came about from the internet....the World Wide consortium, hearing the thoughts and lessons that many like-minded people have learned along the way.

[BIGAL]

I read with interest about usings pdf's you should be able to create a normal size pdf but replot "outsource" at larger scale we do this all the time. turn A4's into A1's 297 now 841.

 

Couple of problems though getting scaling right is a nightmare.