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*NIX Ripping Solutions For Plotters

Posted by timothy on from the let-one-rip dept.

haogemenr writes: "I work in an all Apple architecture firm, but we have a Linux box that primarily functions as a DSL router. The options for large format plotter drivers in the Macintosh world are few and relatively expensive. PostScript output devices are a great, but expensive solution and HP doesn't provide any Mac-friendly drivers for non-PostScript plotters. What are the *nix solutions? You can write PostScript from CAD application using a generic PostScript driver, but converting PostScript to an RTL file or HPGL2 file is necessary for lots of older plotters. I've heard of an application named makertl, but I haven't been able to find it anywhere. What do Unix folks use for large format image processing?"

2 of 39 comments (clear)

  1. Possible solutions... by Thauma · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Well these are *nix solutions, but they may work for your office.

    MacPlot is a commecial product from www.microspot.co.uk which can act as a network based RIP server for the mac...

    HP has their own RIP software for windows that is packaged with the HP 500 PS. (There was also a version for the 455CA and 488).

    There is a company that sells some very high end RIP software called PosterJet. (www.posterjet.de) which I belive will turn a windows box into a RIP server.

    Of course, the best solution would be to use a printer that was supported on the Mac!!!

    I know the people that do VectorWorks (probably the best all around Mac CAD package) made a viewer available for free. Just download the viewer onto a windows machine and use the HP drivers. Hell, this would probably work under WINE as well.

    If your not using VectorWorks, you could also just print to a PDF file on a network voulme (print2pdf from www.jwwalker.com is great for this), and again have a windows machine just output and delete everything in that directory every few minutes.

    Jeez!

  2. Re:Um... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting
    $100K? Nope. HP makes a half-dozen or so 36" inkjet plotters under $10K, and you can pick up pretty nice used ones for $2k-$5k on ebay. Now you might end up spending $100K/year on ink cartridges, but *somebody* has to keep Carly's G-IV in Jet-A.

    I've got a plotter at work (HP755CM), fed by non-general-purpose commercial software (Cadence Raptor), but I'd love to have a general-purpose Postscript->optimized-RTL path for it without having to touch Windows.

    A quick Google search shows there are folks using Ghostscript "uniprint" drivers for DesignJets, and there is ppm2rtl, which looks pretty interesting.

    -Jay-