Ok, my neighbor is an architect. Since he's moving to Texas and can't take everything, I've acquired his plotter. Its a 9144mm or 36inch hp 2500cp inkjet that had lots of problems. Also, if you know any thing about how to get this old thing to communicate with my computer please tell. it has a jetdirect 10baseT module and a parallel port. the printer head belt went to hell, looked online it was going for $175, there's no f-ing way i was going pay that much. so i used some ribbon from the craft store- $3. the blue ink didn't work ether. he left me with extra cartridges. so i took a magenta cartridge, snapped off the aligning keys and filled it up cyan ink. lol
There is a ink reservoir. I could probably fill it up with generic stuff. Plus he gave me some extra ink. I still have to figure out how to get it to communicate with my pc. I'm downloading some software that should allow this but its not looking too good atm. I know it prints, my neighbor printed some stuff from autocad the other day, so this has to do with software related stuff.
I think autocad has a special output for plotters and I'm not willing to spend $3000+ on 1.3 gb of cad software.
The plotter at my work plots anything, from PDFs to emails (I forget to reset the default printer) but it is pretty new
Linux might be your friend here.. Or CUPS for that matter.. there seams to be several 2500 model HP options available.. http://www.cups.org/ppd.php?L
The plotter at my work uses a parallel port, and then through the network; but it's a Xerox model. It's pretty slow and finnicky, but it gets the job done.
See if you can get a cheap copy of FlixiSign (http://www.saintl.biz/) thats what we use for cutting vinyl, it also supports plotters too, along with native Illustrator support
When i saw the title of the post i thought: Haha, no printer is bigger than mine, a 10 yrs+ old laser printer. I stand corrected.
