Speed Up Printing

[darkman257]

I am sure it has been discussed before so I apologize for posting this.  I have aerials with lots of parcels and lineweights.  I am printing to 24x36 on an HP T1100.  After about 40 minutes, the one sheet finally gets sent to the plotter.  The file size to the ploter was about 97 MB, well below my memory on the plotter.  My assumption is that for some reason my CAD machine is having to reduce the information somewhat.   My question is, how can I make that a little faster?   It is kind of annoying.   Thanks. 

[IanMcClain · Accepted solution]

Try making a pdf with .DWG to PDF.pc3.

I once had a 7,000+ acre topo with imagery background that made 100+ MB .plt files (8 sheets). Each one took the better part of an hour. I found it was faster to use .DWG to PDF.pc3 driver and was able to create a multi-sheet pdf that was only about a 1/10th the size of the combined .plt files and printed much faster. Used an HP1080 plotter.

[antoniovinci]

I concur in creating PDF, then you send it to the plotter with this magic tool.

[darkman257]

Thanks guys, I will give it a try.   I was thinking that it seemed either my computer or the server print spooling was the issue and if there was a setting somewhere in there that I could turn on to give me more memory in the spooling because when I watched it, that is what took forever.  When it finally got sent the the printer you could watch the data being sent ot the printer (took less than a minute) and then it was off the printer and the printer started dancing.   Thanks for the help!