I have been using Stardraw A/V for a year now and we finally bought a HP DesignJet 500 Plotter.  When I print out my Block drawings I use different color lines, and styles for different types of signals.  I have found that any line that is not solid print's out very faint. Please let me know if this is a setting in Stardraw or something that needs to be changed in the plotter.

Thanks

Gareth

Hi Gareth,

Stardraw is able to define a minimum pen width for solid lines; this is defined in tenths of a millimeter by the document attribute "_DefaultPenWidth".  Lines that use a style other than solid cannot support pen widths other than 0 - this is a Windows thing and beyond our control - so they will have a width that is interpreted by your printer as "as thin as I can print".  This is obviously a high-res printer, which is why the lines are faint.

As far as we know there is no setting either in Windows or the printer that could beef up the minimum printed line width.  You will be able to work around this, however, if you simply switch from using dashed or dotted lines to solid lines.

Rob,

I have changed to all solid lines and have been using colours to tell different signal types.  According to a friend of mine that does CAD is they have a setting for line weight no matter if it is dash or solid.  I've never used CAD so I don't know how this works but would love if there was something more we could do about this.

Thank you

Gary

Hi Gary,

Stardraw does not support widths other than 0 for non-solid lines, because Windows does not.  The application your friend is talking about may well offer this functionality because different applications do things in different ways.   I can only reiterate that Stardraw cannot offer widths other than 0 for non-solid line styles.  

Sorry about that, but if everything did everything the same way there would be no differentiation between products.  I hope this makes some sense.