Symptoms:
1 Pen plotters: a second plot starts before you have time to
change the paper (or advance to a new sheet with roll feed).
2 Ink jet and laser plotters: the drawing appears with more than
one plot, the plots being on top of one another.
Scope: This error has been reported when using a Windows NT 4.0 service pack 4 network, with an HP DesignJet plotter directly connected to one of the networked computers. TCP/IP protocol was in use. The RoboCAD plotter driver was for the HP7580.
Diagnosis: Look at the print queue for the plotter. You will see that subsequent plots are added to the first print job, instead of being queued as separate jobs.
Cause: The error is caused by the Windows print queue server not recognising the end of each individual plot.
Correction: there are at least two possibilities:
1 - To correct the problem in Windows, locate the end of job time out setting
for the plotter, and set it to a low value such as 5 seconds. You may need
to do this on all the affected computers as well as the one running the
plotter. This should result in each plot being queued separately.
2 - if you can't do this, use the HP DesignJet driver, which includes the
HPGL begin plot and end plot commands. This will force the plotter to separate
the plots.
For the curious:
The HPGL command syntax to start and stop a plot is:
IN; start plot (INitialize)
PG; end plot (new PaGe)
You can download the HP DesignJet driver from here.
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