xp running hp plotter?

[tinman13]

Hi all, I have a hp 7585b plotter that dosen't seem to like to talk to my computer running on xp. The hp site dosen't list a specfic driver for the plotter, but the computer dosen't recognise that it is there either. Am I missing something obvious here or is it a compatibility thing? btw it works fine with win 98. Thanks in advance, Steve

[fyffe555]

MS in their wisdom didn't include any pen plotter drivers in XP or Win2k. The manufacturers including HP haven't provided drivers for XP since XP wasn't around when the pen plotters where replaced by inkjet.

You have several solutions;

Autocad has its own Plotter driver component and you can drive most older pen plotters from Autocad in any OS Autocad installs in. Works well but if you're producing iges or stl files theres a problem getting them into autocad and plotting with the correct line types, weights, layers, colours and with hidden line removal.

The second is a third party driver for win2k or XP, theres only one, WinLine - not readily available, not cheap but it does work well and does work from 3d software printing iges, stl etc. I've used it with rhino without problems. Can't justify the ~$160 for it at home though.

I've heard suggested that you can sometimes attach and install the plotter on a win98 machine so the printer is a native printer and transfer the XP/2k sourced files to the 98 machine and use the print file directly there. I've tried it and the problem here is that it only works with file formats the native printer recognises - hpgl, dxf, dwg etc. Works correctly about 50% of the time and probably 100% if you want to spend the time working what line types and layers needed and page scaling.

Finally the ideal solution is to get a driver written - but that's beyond me unfortunately...

Andrew

[tinman13]

Thanks for the quick reply, I was afraid that might be the case.... oh well! Thanks Steve

[nikolatesla20]

Hi, if your plotter speaks HPGL, most CAD programs can be coerced to output HPGL (export as HPGL format), then you can go to a DOS window and do the following commands, for example:

mode com1:9600,1,8,N,P

copy <path to HPGLFile> com1

And it will send the data out the COM port to the plotter. I'm using a very old HP Colorpor 7440 and it works if I do this - although my CAD software (DesignCad3d Max) does not export correctly, so I made my own program to load up the HPGL file and let me align the part on the page.

-niko