Plotting from Medusa has always been a source of difficulty. The developers have tried a number of different approaches to provide quality output from this excellent drafting program. I feel that a lot of the complexity of the resulting systems has been due to the needs of the larger customers dictating the requirements. These requirements have favoured the dedicated print room where all plotting is undertaken and the resulting plots are stored as masters for printing. Most of the modern CAD systems don't work this way and here at CCL we no longer have a dedicated print room and expect users to print to local printers.

Since the introduction of Version 12 we have tried to run the plotting system in cyclic mode rather than collecting the files into a queue and plotting in batches. This has proved to be less reliable than we hoped and the plotting process dies unexpectedly every couple of days. It can take several hours before this is spotted and action taken. Altogether too much of a faff!

With the introduction of MedusaNG running on NT I tried to get the various PC to send their files to the UNIX plot queue using the remote plotting facilities. I never got this to work. A combination of poor manuals, over-complex software and lack of knowledge probably. This meant that I had to run a print queue on each of the PCs and the printed output was really poor quality - grey scale lines, low resolution and too time consuming to use - every PC user of medusa needed to become and expert in managing queues!

Early in 1997 with help from Graham Snudden of CVSS and later from Alan Liddle of Root Solutions I put in place a direct plotting/printing system for both our PCs and our UNIX workstations. This system didn't replace the old Queue plotting system but it did mean that I no longer had to struggle to keep it running in cyclic mode.

The benefits I have seen from doing this are as follows:-

• The line quality is significantly better
  • the PTC direct printing tool gives a less dense, fuzzy edged line that is grey rather than black.

• I can control the printed line thickness to suit the printers we use.

• Circles are rounder (less faceted) as I can use a smaller arcfac for printing than would be appropriate for drawing.

• Faster - as I can set the area to match the default paper and be sure that the output will use the paper efficiently without the need to select the orientation. This means 2 clicks rather than 5 and less chance to get it wrong.

• Centrally controlled - As I have the macros in the CCL "product", the same macro is called by all the machines (including the UNIX boxes).

• Printing looks the same on all platforms (the PTC version is NT only)

I do still have the traditional queue based plotting application available on the UNIX machines and we do use it for the times when we need to plot significant numbers of drawings or any of the other things that are only possible from the rich tool pallet of the Medusa plotting application. The following is a description of the files used and how it is setup on CCL's Medusa installation.

Requirements