CAD Software Forum

I have also logged this on the CADOPIA site

I am having several issues with plotting, i have come from an autocad environment and had the luxury of their internal HPGL driver, i now not only don't have that or a system level driver for the plotter (win 2000 and XP) but find i need to buy Winline driver.
I have found that the plot extents does not actually bring the lower left (ll) of the drawing to the lower left of the paper, but using plot window i can get around it. However I have found that on all plots i have a small (0.1mm) line in the -y direction being plotted before every pen up, see example below. It is not the winline driver as I have output the same file from autocad and have no problems.

PU-14120,7120;
PD-2120,7120;
PD-2120,7116; *** here
PU-14180,-940;
PD-14180,7120;
PD-14180,7116; *** here as well
PU-18240,3060;

this would not be a problem except that i am actuall using a cutter instead of a pen and this puts tick marks on the document and also means that it needs to pick up the cutter, rotate the head and then put it down again, this leads to the file taking longer to plot that before.

also how do i get the plot optimised (as in acad) for reduced pen movement and also in the pen order i need.

these issues mean that the plots i can create with icad are taking 4min 27sec each instead of 2min 30sec, as a 1 off this would not be important but i need to produce 100+ of these plots per day so time is important.

also is there a way (i assume via vba) to set all the windows and plotting parameters including printer name so that i can get consistant results?

regards

Tony Klapisch

tony.klapisch@siemens.com.au

G'Day Tony,

Have a look into the command draworder and the sortents system variable.

SORTENTS
Controls the order in which entities are sorted for such operations as entity selection and snap, redraws and regens, and plotting and Postscript output.

Type: Integer
Saved: In the .DWG
Range: 1 to 127
Default: 96


0 Disables SORTENTS
1 Sorts for object selection
2 Sorts for object snap
4 Sorts for redraws
8 Sorts for MSLIDE command slide creation
16 Sorts for REGEN commands
32 Sorts for plotting
64 Sorts for PostScript output

To select more than one setting, enter the sum of the settings' codes

The initial value of 96 enables sorting for plotting and PostScript output only. Setting additional sorting options can result in slower regeneration and redrawing times.

You could create a lisp routine to set the draw order and plot order to your entity requirements.

Printer configuration files (PCP) may solve some of your setup problems - have a look at these.


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Regards
John Finlay

thanks john, ill try and get back to you/the forum

PS thanks for all the work last week on dxf we now can get around the issues, but only with the wait introduced by the msgbox