Slow plotting with FDO objects

[nwray]

Hi all,

I've been working on a map that contains a number of standard AutoCAD objects, as well as three sets of FDO objects.  All FDO items are SDF's.  If it makes a difference, 2 of the FDO sets are points, and the third is lines.  All of the FDO items are styled fairly extensively, but there are no labels.

When I try to print to a regular plotter, it just spools up for a half hour or so, then I get a message from the system that the plot has failed.  For whatever reason, I never get an actual CAD error message when this happens.  When I try to print to PDF using the on-board DWG -> PDF driver, I get a pdf with every drawing object smeared accross the bottom of the print - it's completely un-useable.  I'm currently trying to print using a 3rd party PDF driver (Cute PDF).  It almost crashed my system, but now I am looking at a print file that has spooled up to 2.5 GB!  The actual drawing file is a bit under 10 Mb in size, so I don't know where this huge plot spool is coming from.

I'm using Map3D 2010 on a Windows XP machine with the max (4GB) of ram.  Any ideas on what the problem might be would be appreciated!

Thanks,

Norm

[nwray · Accepted solution]

Hi all,

I was able to work some more on this problem and I found that it's not the FDO objects causing the problem.  It seems to be an issue with the physical size of the sheet that I want to print to (I'm trying to plot as a 36" x 54" sheet) .  I verified this by removing and deleting all FDO connections in the drawing, then re-drawing everything using standard CAD entities.  When trying to plot this drawing, I ended up with the same problems as before - a 2.5GB spool file that was way to big for the plotter to handle.  

My work around has been to plot to a DWF file and use Design Review to plot from there.  This works, although it's frustrating because the printable area is slightly different for some reason.  Also, design review is giving me major headaches about printing to a non-standard size page.  No matter how many ways I try to set it at 36" x 54", it will never show that in the print dialogue.  I'm going to see if I can find any design review forums that might have an answer for that.

Anyhow, I'm marking this as solved, even though it's just a workaround.  If anyone has any additional info on why this was happening in the first place, I'd like to know.  

Thanks,

Norm