[rescue] Re: [geeks] Cleaning out advice needed...

[Dave McGuire]

On Tuesday, January 21, 2003, at 09:56 PM, Scott Newell wrote:
>> Old plotters are useful? or is there something special about the
>
> Shoot yeah.  Big drawings sometimes demand big paper, and those large
> format inkjets are not cheap.  Pen plotters may be slow, but they're 
> cheap.

   Pen plotters are VERY cheap.  I have a big E-size Draftmaster sitting 
on mothballs until I get a bigger house...I paid $100.00 for it a 
couple of years ago.  The same gov't surplus place had a bunch of the 
big E-size inkjets, beat up and some even missing parts, that were 
going for $1K *as-is*.  And with worse-quality output to boot! (at 
least for the kind of stuff I plot...architects and landscape designers 
put those big inkjets to much better use).

>  I've been debating on whether I can find space for one at work.

   Go for it.

> HPs are nice because they're well supported in CAD packages.

   HPGL is also very, very easy to deal with.  I wrote a simple (and, 
well, primitive) PCB autorouting package for X11 about 11 years 
ago...it could send its output to a Postscript printer or an HPGL 
device.  The HPGL output routines were super easy to do.

           -Dave

--
Dave McGuire           "Wear whatever you want...Just don't be surprised
St. Petersburg, FL        if you wind up with a blow-gun dart in your
                            prosthetic boobies."    -Kurt Huhn