Posted by Peter Rosenthal on October 10, 2003 at 20:17:55:In Reply to: Re: Printing again posted by Peter Drasnin on October 10, 2003 at 15:28:23:
Peter D-
As it turns out... my wife is one of the "brainy-acts" of which you referred!! She works for the government and has used Macs since the beginning of time. She draws and proofs maps for the survey in the 300-500MB range with a now defunct (rest in peace) HP 3500 and now is the proud user of an HP 5500ps (your tax dollars at work!). She never had printing problems in OS9. Since moving to OSX she lost, completely, the ability to print landscape orientation on roll paper. No way. It's not a function of OSX however. It's HP's drivers, as has been noted on this thread. She didn't want to be wasting the paper you mentioned either and it pissed her off on principal, to boot.This is her workaround. Keep in mind it is not a custom paper size she is working with. It is a NEW default paper size! It shows up as default and she happily and successfully I might add, selects it when she prints her maps. Pure genius. SHE should be working for HP. HP tech support knows nothing of this. When the HP printer installer guy (this is what you get for your 18,000 bucks!) struggled to print her landscape format maps, he worked for most of the day to get it to work and failed. She went in and modified the printer description in 10 minutes and worked the first time... and everytime.
Here goes... Go to the Printers folder in the main Library. PPDs > Contents > Resources > en.lproj (this is the english version of the printer descriptions that holds ALL of the page sizes) You can even throw the other versions away unless you should WANT to print with the Dutch version. Inside these .lproj's are printer description text files that the printer uses to print. At least some of the guts of the printer driver. At least the parts that are relevant to us! Find the HP Designjet 1055CM file. There will probably be a .gz compressed version and an uncompressed version. Double click on that one. It will open in TextEdit. Inside are all of (among other things) the default paper sizes. After you scroll down for a while you will eventually find the "inch" paper sizes as opposed to the metric paper sizes. In your case I'd pick this listing to start:
*HPAutoScaling P24x108/24" x 108": "
/HPDict /ProcSet findresource /SetAutoScale get true exch exec /HPDict /ProcSet findresource /SetDestinationPageSize get [1728 7776] exch exec
<<>> setpagedevice"
*EndThis is the last page size listing before the page becomes 36" wide. It is, obviously, 24" wide. Copy this listing, and paste it just after it in order. What we want to do is to change the page sizes in both inches and points (inches x 72 points) so it looks like this:
*HPAutoScaling P30x42/30" x 42": "
/HPDict /ProcSet findresource /SetAutoScale get true exch exec /HPDict /ProcSet findresource /SetDestinationPageSize get [2160 3024] exch exec
<<>> setpagedevice"
*EndNote the inches and point sizes have been changed. It would be great if this were all we had to do but there are 5 more listing changes we have to make as we scroll down. Count them! ALL listings that use the original paper size must be copied and changed. They are all pretty obvious and direct except one listing which is under the "printable area" heading. The first number must be 22 points less than the 2160 (30") dimension- "2138", and the 3024 (42") must be 33 points less- "2991". Close the window, save, and print your brains out!!!
This may seem overwhelming at first read but will make sense once you look at it thoroughly. You may want to duplicate the whole file onto the desktop for safekeeping unless you like working without a net to bail yourself out later should the dog throw-up on the carpet while you are making these changes, or some such thing.
This actually works. Good Luck and let us know.
Peter Rosenthal
Oh yeah... one other thing. A lot has been posted about slow redraw times using PC6 and OSX. These map files I referred to earlier redraw in 5 seconds or less with a dual 1.25mHz G4 and 1.5 gigs of memory. 400MB vector files redrawing in 6 seconds!! She uses Adobe Illustrator 10 for these maps. This would indicate that slow redraw times is not a Quartz issue (it's on by default permanently with Illustrator!) or an OSX issue. This is a software issue. A PowerCadd issue to be blunt. Am I wrong here? What other variables are there??
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