Topic Title

I am plotting to an HP Design Jet 430 from DC11. I use two paper sizes, 18X24 & 24x36. I have a 24" wide roll of paper installed on the plotter. Obviously, the most efficient use of the paper would be that drawings on either paper size print out with a 24" side coming out of the plotter first. However, no matter what setting I change, the 18X24 drawings persist in coming out with the 18" side first, so that I have to trim the paper. What a pain! I have tried to set the rotate option in the plotter setup in DC. I have also tried to make the appropriate settings via the printer setup from control panel in Windows XP. Nothing seems to make a difference.

Any suggestions?

Thanks!

Hello & welcome!

Unfortunately, this is a problem with the plotter and/or the HP driver. You have to turn off Auto Rotate, and set the paper size to Software -- or you may have to try all the paper size settings...

The basic problem, as I can figure, is that the margins that are set in driver have no real basis for the actual physical limitations on the plotter. I have always ended up using a "Custom" paper size -- in this case it would be Custom 18x24 and 24x36, as this seems to have no margin limits in the driver and you are only limited by the plotter's physical limits.

When there are margin limits in the driver, the plotter "thinks" that the plot won't fit, so it rotates it. I went through this (again) recently with 18x24 plots on 24" roll on a new 1050, which is a 36" wide plotter.

Once (and if) you get it to plot correctly, then you have to try and get the correct margins -- I have to resort to very light "tick marks" in the lower left and upper right corners of the border, so that the margins plot evenly. And the kicker is that once I have worked it out on Win2K --then it doesn't work the same on WinXP! We have worked it out, that we should probably spring for the WinLine driver, which should be consistent across different Windows flavors.

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