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We are looking at making changes to the plotter setup for both interactive plotting, interactive Save As to PDF and CreoView plotting on a remote machine.
The reason for looking at changes is to get all plotting methods to produce identical plotted drawings. We do plot drawings from CreoView, as well as the PDF and interactively.
We have HP DesignJet plotters and interactively we have no table.pnt file defined on the system. I am guessing Creo is defaulting to a set of built-in values for the plotting pen widths.
The CreoView publishing machine uses a hp7600-355 as the defined plotter and we have the config.pro option pdf_use_pentable set to yes.
The pen table is:
Pen 1 thickness 0.05 cm
Pen 2 thickness 0.05 cm
Pen 3 thickness 0.05 cm
Pen 4 thickness 0.5 cm
Pen 5 thickness 0.5 cm
Pen 6 thickness 0.5 cm
Pen 7 thickness 0.5 cm
Pen 8 thickness 0.5 cm
In the system-wide config.pro, we have the following lines:
pen1_line_wieght 2
pen2_line_wieght 2
pen3_line_wieght 2
pen4_line_wieght 1
pen5_line_wieght 1
pen6_line_wieght 1
pen7_line_wieght 1
pen8_line_wieght 1
I cannot find any documentation on these line formats for defining pens.
Has anyone else gone through the process of configuring your system so all plots 'look the same' when done?
Ben
Windchill/PDMLink 10.0 m040
Creo 2 m100 (I do have some higher builds, if there are changes that will help)
I did some more research and did find that the pen#_line_weight values are used for electrostatic plotters with a range of 1 (thin) to 16 (thick) line widths.
I will do some more research into the HP7600 and see what values I can get for these settings in inches or cm/mm.
Still a little confused about how the prior admin set these up since he had the pen#_line_weight settings for designjet plotters and not electrostatic (laser). Maybe the designjets (5500PS) use the electrostatic (7600) pen commands?
Hi,
config.pro option pen#_line_weight
Creo Community - For users of Pro/ENGINEER, Windchill, and other PTC affiliated products | News page contains following explanation:
A5_Q1-083006
You can use the setting in your config.pro file called "penx_line_weight" (where x=1,2,...8).
The value can be an integer from 1 to 16. The actual line weight will be the integer value you specify multiplied by .005 inches (I'm not sure what happens if you're using millimeters).
INFO: I do not use these options, because I prefer using pen table file.
MH
I try to use pen#_line_weight because user assigned line widths will be plotted as assigned, unlike the use of pen tables, which over-ride the widths assigned to lines that have line colors over-ridden in the pen table. The alternative is to change line colors to less frequently used ones, change their widths, and leave those colors out of the pen table.
<rant>
The line thickness decision tree is too long and poorly managed. I don't know why every decision by the PTC plotting/visualization group seems to be one that is in the direction of increasing difficulty and decreasing the quality of the output. I suspect it is related to flaws in the detailing group work, but it isn't entirely on detail.
For example, the text font "font" is designed to account for the diameter of the ink pen used to plot it. To simulate this effect in PDF/Postscript one needs to use setlinejoin and setlinecap to both be 1 in the Postscript output. The plotting group has refused to change this, so all the output using the default font 'font' looks like garbage. Then, after more than a decade, PTC specifically added that option to only the direct PDF export.
Who knows what conversations inside PTC led to this fracture of opinion, but they certainly specifically decided to -not- add a config option to duplicate the wet-pen behavior in Postscript output.
I also know PTC specifically decided to not include these options for the entities in Detail; there is no option to set line cap and line join types directly for detail items and have the results of those options show on the screen. This is unlike many other vector drawing tools, especially Postscript, but even the free tool Inkscape, as seen below. The Detail group also decided that displays of hidden line fonts should also have delayed evaluation, leaving it to the Plotting/visualization group, so the Detail user has no control over a crucial aspect of the final appearance of their product.
There's no /rant because it would continue on with the weak spline handling. In contrast, note the node-curvature handles in Inkscape. What is in the diagram is a single path that has perfectly straight segments and curved segments. The scissors symbol is one of dozens available under the end-point marker selections. While I would not expect PTC to have that wide a variety, even simple arrowheads would help in creating certain symbols. And symbols are a whole separate rant.
There is so much PTC never improved upon. There is not even a glimmer of hope that they will actually make changes to the core that would be "revolutionary". When they blew the Creo 3.0 detailing "enhancement", I pretty much gave up. I will likely retire on Creo 2.0 M040 ...just because it is stable for me.
Let me ask this question about plotter settings.
What plotter type do others use in their files for plotting to different output types?
PDF output from the CreoView publisher is using Plotter hp7600-355 in donfig.pro
Interactively we have no defined plotter in config.pro, but using MS_print_manager, we select a HPDJ5500.
We also do save as PDF from within Creo2.
All of these files are eventually plotted to the HP DJ5500 and they come out looking a little differently. I would expect the PDF files to look different as they are bing generated through different processes.
Any feedback on what plotter definitions others are using will be a help in normalizing the output results.
As to prior replies in this thread, I do agree that PTC has been stagnant for too long when it comes to 'fixing' their output mechanisms. Siemen's NX used to use internally developed plotting code but a few years ago switched to a third-party that gave the users better control over the image generation and thus better printed results. Maybe it is time for PTC to do the same!
All that I've seen work is to have only one place to generate the files, such as Save-As/Export. I just can't see how to get the various methods to sync because they are using different code to do so. The MS_print_manger is the generic Windows interface to plotting, which then devolves into vector (Postscript) and raster forms and is entirely different from the Export method which is designed to build much different information into the PDFs, such as searchable text or TrueType fonts.
Hi,
from my point of view your questions are too general. I think you have to describe your situation exactly if you expect some valuable answers.
I can imagine that you open a drawing in Creo and:
and outputs are looking a little differently.
Now I would like to what means "little differently" ? Are line widths different ? Is scale different ?
I do not understand what is "CreoView publisher". If you have Windchill PDMLink implemented then your "publishing machine" is running Creo to generate PDF.
MH