Network printing

[Igaduma]

Hi all,

I'm a bit confused..

I need to set up a few HP Designjets as plotters/printers for a group of NT machines.
The ideal solution would be:
NT clients printing to a file on a shared drive on a sun ultra10, form there the server software has to pick up that file, and send it to the plotter.
The shared drive bit is done by samba, which is already set up & running.

Can anyone recommend a good site or application for this ?

Thanks for any info,

Iga

 

[Igaduma]

Hi all,

So far so good, I managed to install jetdirect on solaris8, got the plotter up & running.

I installed the HP 4.60 designjet drivers on an NT box & made it print to file.

When firing off that file to the designjet using jetdirect spool it works amazingly good.

One problem:

The application from which we print can use transparency between 2 layers.
So you have a full color bitmap as background and another layer on top, which has it's transparency set to 50%, so you can see the underlaying bitmap "through" the colors.
This doesn't seem to work, it seems to discard the transparent layer.
I'm printing-to-file as RAW type and then firing it off using HP/GL2 format on the printer. Works good, but no transparency.

Anyone any idea for this problem ?

Is it related to jetdirect which takes the raw output file or is it caused by the printerdriver on NT which prints-to-file ?
The 64 million $ question...

Any help welcome,

Iga

 

[Igaduma]

Hi all,

Again

The problem seems related to the plotter running out of memory.
This problem can be solved in the printer control panel on an NT machine, you select to use first plotter memory & then computer memory.
This however has got no effect when printing to file, therefore I need to set it somewhere in jetdirect.

Anyone got a clue ?

Thanks

Iga

 

[Igaduma]

Hi all,

Solved.

Running perfect, just shared the printer via samba, installed it with local drivers on NT client and everything works as it should.
huge 200Mb plots are plotted almost instantly, only bottleneck being the network throughput.

Cool.


Iga