Plotters

[David Collins]

I have written an OpenGL application which is used to support a
commercial contract. A requirement for my application is that it support
printing to plotters. My application prints fine to color printers such
as an Epson printer we are using, but fails when I try to print to a
plotter.

I am using an HP 800 plotter. When I try to print to this device, I get
a dialog box which indicates that I am successfully connecting to the
plotter and that the job is waiting to print. When I request that the
job actually be printed, nothing happens. It seems that no data is being
transferred to the plotter.

Question: Is there something peculiar about plotters and OpenGL? Do I
have to do something different than required to simply print to a color
printer?

[JohnHutch]

Have you had any luck with printing from OpenGL. I have been attempting to use a metafile for the job but have some problems. I can use a bitmap OK but the size can be big.

Interested in your experiences

[WhatEver]

A plotter? You're prolly overloading it with info and then it just aborts. As far as I know a plotter uses "from xy" "to xy" "pen number" data. If you're trying to send a file over that isn't formatted like that, it prolly won't work at all.

I'm no expert, but I have used plotters alot for when I did alot of CAD(Computer Aided Drafting). All the plotters used a file with the extention .plt.

Good luck!

[Sanya]

I have similar problem with plotter and trying to use metafile for then print it. But i have no one program which can load OpenGL metafile and then print it at plotter (like CorelDraw and etc.)

Interested in your experiences too http://www.opengl.org/discussion_boards/ubb/smile.gif

[David Collins]

I solved my problem by writting a GDI function which takes openGL (x,y) vertices and prints them out. I am lucky that my data lends itself to such a solution. Using GDI avoids driver problems and everything has worked out well. Not only can I print to plotters, but by using GDI I have a lot of flexibility with regards to manipulating text.

Through further research I found that my problems with openGL were in fact driver problems. In particular, many print drivers don't work with the setPixelFormat() function.

[Kilam Malik]

I think it's not only the setpixelformat. is there any printer on the market, which can understand the whole opengl API? That would be needed to print via a gdi directly with opengl.

[David Collins]

Yes there is a printer which supports OpenGL. Its the Epson Stylus Photo EX. I have successfully used this color printer and it works fine. My problem was that I have to print to an HP Plotter and other printers which don't support OpenGL.