Topic Title

I am trying to plot a drawing that contains dotted arcs. When they print out, the spacing is good (3in.), but the dots themselves are much too small and faint.

I have tried increasing the weight of the dotted lines to 2pt, 3pt, and then 6pt, and although the change in dot size was apparent on the screen, I was able to see no discernable difference in the printouts (3/16" scale, 24"x36" plots on an HP500)

How can I make the dots print out bolder / bigger?

I would change the color to a thicker lineweight color. i.e. if you have them currently on color Brown and that color = .212, you could turn them to say a color Yellow if that color was = .494 and this would more than double their appearance. Simply adjust the color to your pen table settings.

Greetings Tyson,

If you are using line color (via the Pen Table) to determine the width of lines on the plot, then you can change the color of the lines to something heavier. I have found for dotted lines, you need to have a width of 0.15mm or so, in order to have it show up.

Another possible solution is to change the plot quality up a notch -- if you are using Draft, then changing to Normal would likely help. Some plotters and/or their drivers do not have a very high raster resolution -- 300dpi simply "misses" many of the dots, so increasing it to 600dpi would have many more (all?) the dots show up better. The WinLine Plus driver has this high resolution raster option, if your stock driver doesn't.