[wplug] plotters

[Rick Smith]

On Tue, Jun 03, 2003 at 10:17:03AM -0400, John Harrold wrote:
> Sometime in June Rick Smith assaulted the keyboard and produced:
> 
> | I am a stock holder and ex-firmware engineer who worked on
> | plotters for 15 years, from the old vector machines through the
> | transition to raster w/postscript and finally the moving of
> | engineering from San Diego to Barcelona.
> 
> so could you come by and fix our 8000dn brick. it keeps jamming on paper
> from the second tray :).

Heh, well can't help you there ;(
That's HP Boise, not HP San Diego.
I don't know that particular beast but have had my fair share of
experience unjamming.  From the engineering point of view, paper
handling is a difficult problem.  From a user point of view, it's
such a maddening nuisance when it fouls up.

> | A piece of the puzzle you need to understand is what languages
> | do your application(s)-which-plot speak?
> | 
> | There are a few languages the plotters use:
> | Postscript, PCL, HP-GL/2, direct render of jpg, tiff and the like.
> | Probably more today since I've away from it for so long.
> 
> most of the stuff we generate will be done in latex. so postscript is going
> to be a must. we may have to print powerpoint stuff on occasion, and i
> think windows can generate pcl. i kind of assumed that postscript would be
> supported and most hardware would have windows drivers-bad assumption?

I don't think you'll have a problem.  Still great to be able to find
someone who has set something similar up before and clone what they
did.  As a final plug, HP does have some Linux drivers.  Not in all
cases, but it's expanding.  Good luck.

-- Rick