Topic Title

Our office is printing / plotting on an HP Designjet 800. Until recently, we've been using 24" roll paper (though it is capable of 42" roll). To speed up plot time, we're trying 36" roll paper, but are finding that borders are being cut off. This happens in DataCAD and also pdf files in Adobe Acrobat. The sheets should be 24" x 36", most borders are 23" x 34.5". In searching the HP website (not very user friendly), I've found that the printable area of a D size sheet in portrait mode is 34.7 x 23.6" (which works fine), but that the printable area of a D size sheet in landscape mode is 22.7 x 35.6". This is where our border is getting cut off. Has anyone else come across this? More importantly, has anyone found a solution other than changing border sizes? Note it is not just our prints but those of our engineers as well. Thanks in advance.
Bev

Outside of DataCAD, in the printer's Properties, define a custom sheet size of 36" x 24" (use Custom page 1) and bypass the standard sizes in the list. Restart DataCAD and select the custom sheet size for printing.

That is one of the screw things with plotters in general, they all have different printing margins and they have different margins for roll feed and sheet feed. One thing you could try, is to shift your border so the entire thing will print. We set up our landscape sheet to have a 3/4" margin at top, bottom and right edge and 1 3/4" margin at the left edge. We have never found any printing problems. I hope this helps.

Hello Bev:

We also have to use a custom paper size in order to get things to plot to the right size and with even borders. We have an HP 1050C, which is a 36" wide plotter.

We actually use a 24.5" x 36" custom size, and we have a small tick mark on the lower left corner, and another tick mark in the upper right corner. These tick marks "force" the border itself to plot with the proper space -- and the cut length of the paper is actually 24", despite the 24.5" paper size, and we have a marker point at the exact center of the diagonal between the two tick marks so that we can insert it in MSP or snap to it in a quick layout.

And WinXP works differently from Win2K -- it is truely a frustrating situation. I'd be happy to email you the border as a starting point for you, if you'd like.