Plotting Black as Black

Hello, I had a thread on this going a few months ago but it seems to have disappeared. If anyone could help me out it would be appreciated.

Our lab is on a network running ADT 3.3 on Win2K. We have a HP450C plotter set up as the system printer. When we use this plotter, the blacks plot as dark gray, not solid black. But if we set up a .pc3 file the blacks plot black. We think we've tried all the settings in the printer configuration and ctb files (all pens as black, print colors as black, etc.) but obviously we've missed something.

Is there some way I can send our configuration data and someone can tell me what's wrong? In the previous thread, all Autodesk support said was, "you have something set incorrectly". I guess I already know that. But what setting and where do I set it??

 

You probably have already done this, but...

have you checked the printer's properties? (Start button--> settings-->
printers--> select your printer, right-click, select properties) In the
properties dialogue box, select Printing preferences from the bottom of the
general tab, then select the 'options' tab and check the colour settings to
see if you have "colour as greyscale" selected.

We have the same plotter (but use AutoCAD 2002 and 2004) and ours is set to
automatic for the colour options in the printer properties.

The manual colour option has some things you can change, but we haven't
tried this out!

I have had an instance where someone was selecting to print as 'greyscale'
(using a different HP printer to the one we have) but the prints kept coming
out as a pale green colour rather than black / grey. That problem occurred
because the printer had 'print in colour' selected rather than 'print in
monochrome'; once we changed that and asked it to print in draft mode we had
greyscale no problems.

Hope this helps!

Natasha

 

Hi Durbien!



 



Go to the C:\Program Files\Autodesk Architectural Desktop 3\Plot Styles\<your monochrome pen settings>.ctb file & open it and select the tab Table View under Color you should see black straight across - black will print no matter what.



 



Hope this helps!



Maria



"durbien" <> wrote in message news:...

Hello, I had a thread on this going a few months ago but it seems to have disappeared. If anyone could help me out it would be appreciated.

Our lab is on a network running ADT 3.3 on Win2K. We have a HP450C plotter set up as the system printer. When we use this plotter, the blacks plot as dark gray, not solid black. But if we set up a .pc3 file the blacks plot black. We think we've tried all the settings in the printer configuration and ctb files (all pens as black, print colors as black, etc.) but obviously we've missed something.

Is there some way I can send our configuration data and someone can tell me what's wrong? In the previous thread, all Autodesk support said was, "you have something set incorrectly". I guess I already know that. But what setting and where do I set it??

 

Quote: Your PC3 file, is it based on the Windows driver, or the HDI driver that ships with AutoCAD?



Hmmmm, not quite sure what you mean. In order to plot black, we go into AutoCAD's Plotter Manager and create a plotter for the HP450C - this is the pc3 file that I mean.



It comes up in the plot dialog with the AutoCAD HDI icon (as opposed to the System printer icon). Is that what you mean? Or do you mean when you make a change to the System printer driver and Autocad tells you if you want to save the setting it gets saved as a pc3?



As far as the lockdown aspect, we SEEMED to be doing fine using the System Printer drivers - if people needed different settings they just made changes inside AutoCAD and the plots came out fine.... Well, except for this printer. I suppose we could just make several pc3 files for each printer - i.e. Printer 1 black, Printer 1 color, Printer 1 screened, etc. But we had always done that with .ctb files instead. We were under the impression that Autodesk was encouraging using HP's System Printer Drivers instead of the HDI ones - is this untrue?



In response to the other people trying to help me (I do appreciate this, thank you), we did look at those settings you mentioned and they didn't change anything. BTW the gray I'm talking about isn't a light gray; if you didn't have a true "black" print you might not even notice it. It's just that every other printer (including this one under a different driver) prints BLACK.

 

Thanks Maria, but that IS how we have our ctb files set up. We use exactly the same Windows and AutoCAD settings for all our other plotters - HP500, 750C, 1220, 600, Xerox docuprints, and Laserjet 4MVs and they all plot black as black. (Of course some of those can't print color, so they don't really count)

Our first thought was it was trying to mix the colors to make black. So we went into the Windows System Printer properties and messed with those settings. But no change. The only way we could get it to plot black was to use the .pc3.

One of the people trying to help (not sure if this was an AutoCAD person or an HP person) said that pc3 files were just an AutoCAD interface the system printer - that they were really the same driver. Well, something's different with our setup!

 

>PlotterManager>My Computer>creates and HDI driver based PC3 file.PlotterManager>System Printer>Creates a PC3 file based on the Windows drivers.Both the above are slightly different, causing different behaviors.<<

OK, THAT was the information I needed! We were under the impression we were supposed to ditch the pc3 files altogether, and with the exception of this printer we were getting acceptable results. If you're saying the .pc3 file created as above is using the "correct" drivers, that solves my problem, because the pc3s work.



The aggravating thing is up until about a year ago we used pc3 files (and their ancestors) to control plotters as I said before (Printer 1 black, Printer 1 color, etc.). We just recently switched over to using Windows System printers for everything, because we thought that was what Autodesk was recommending. Plue that's the way most other apps printed, etc. But if I understand you correctly, we should switch back to the old way. Oh well, now I need to re-re-train the instructors! Thanks for all your help!

 

You should be using Windows System Printers WITH a PC3 file, they are not exclusive.  The PC3 file saves the settings for your Printer/Plotter setup.



 



David



"durbien" <> wrote in message news:...

>PlotterManager>My Computer>creates and HDI driver based PC3 file.PlotterManager>System Printer>Creates a PC3 file based on the Windows drivers.Both the above are slightly different, causing different behaviors.<<

OK, THAT was the information I needed! We were under the impression we were supposed to ditch the pc3 files altogether, and with the exception of this printer we were getting acceptable results. If you're saying the .pc3 file created as above is using the "correct" drivers, that solves my problem, because the pc3s work.



The aggravating thing is up until about a year ago we used pc3 files (and their ancestors) to control plotters as I said before (Printer 1 black, Printer 1 color, etc.). We just recently switched over to using Windows System printers for everything, because we thought that was what Autodesk was recommending. Plue that's the way most other apps printed, etc. But if I understand you correctly, we should switch back to the old way. Oh well, now I need to re-re-train the instructors! Thanks for all your help!

 

OK, I understand we've done things backwards here (wouldn't be the first time) but we've run pc3 file setups without having ANY printer defined as a Windows System Printer (back before we were networked, using HDI drivers on standalone machines) and we are currently running using the Windows System Printer Drivers without pc3s over the Network. Not trying to defend what obviously was "wrong", but we've gotten years' worth of acceptable prints out of both setups - the only "hiccup" being this one plotter, on the network. Were we just lucky?

 

OK, I understand we've done things backwards here (wouldn't be the first time) but we've run pc3 file setups without having ANY printer defined as a Windows System Printer (back before we were networked, using HDI drivers on standalone machines) and we are currently running using the Windows System Printer Drivers without pc3s over the Network. Not trying to defend what obviously was "wrong", but we've gotten years' worth of acceptable prints out of both setups - the only "hiccup" being this one plotter, on the network. Were we just lucky?