Plotter and Printer Hardware Considerations

Positioning an AutoCAD drawing on the printer output is something of an art. Before you face a deadline with hundreds of plots to produce, you might want to create some test plots and carefully refine your plotter settings so that you'll have AutoCAD set up properly for those rush jobs.

Part of the setup process will be to understand how your particular printer or plotter works. Each device has its own special characteristics, so a detailed description of printer hardware setup is beyond the scope of this section. However, here are a few guidelines that will make the process easier.

Understanding Your Plotter's Limits

If you're familiar with a word-processing or desktop-publishing program, you know that you can set the margins of a page, thereby telling the program exactly how far from each edge of the paper you want the text to appear. With AutoCAD, you don't have that luxury. To accurately place a plot on your paper, you must know the plotter's hard clip limits. The hard clip limits are like built-in margins, beyond which the plotter will not plot. These limits vary from plotter to plotter (see Figure 7.10).

Figure 7.10: The hard clip limits of a plotter

It's crucial that you know your printer's or plotter's hard clip limits in order to place your drawings accurately on the sheet. Take some time to study your plotter manual and find out exactly what these limits are. Then make a record of them and store it somewhere, in case you or someone else needs to format a sheet in a special way.

Hard clip limits for printers often depend on the software that drives them. You might need to consult your printer manual or use the trial-and-error method of plotting several samples to see how they come out.

After you've established the limits of your plotter or printer, you'll be better equipped to fit your drawing within those limits. You can then establish some standard drawing limits based on your plot- ter's limits. You'll also need to know the dimensions of those hard clip limits to define custom sheet sizes. Although AutoCAD offers standard sheet sizes in the Paper Size And Orientation button group of the Plot Configuration dialog box, these sizes do not take into account the hard clip limits.

Knowing Your Plotter's Origins

Another important consideration is the location of your plotter's origin. For example, on some plotters, the lower-left corner of the plot area is used as the origin. Other plotters use the center of the plot area as the origin. When you plot a drawing that is too large to fit the sheet on a plotter that uses a corner for the origin, the image is pushed toward the top and to the right of the sheet (see Figure 7.11). When you plot a drawing that is too large to fit on a plotter that uses the center of the paper as the origin, the image is pushed outward in all directions from the center of the sheet.

Figure 7.11: Plotting an oversized image on a plotter that uses the lower- left corner for its origin

In each situation, the origin determines a point of reference from which you can relate your drawing in the computer to the physical output. After you understand this, you're better equipped to accurately place your electronic drawing on the physical media.