I have a Sekonic SPL450 plotter that i am trying to get working with Windows XP and Inkscape so it can be displayed at a museum i volunteer at. It proving difficult!
The plotter is compatible with the Roland DXY drivers which i have installed on XP. I am using an old version of Inkscape to send the drawing to the plotter. The plotter will print the drawing i send sometimes on the first try when i switch everything on. Every time after that it will print as if the paper is in portrait so half missing or print in a strange low resolution mode. I cant seem to get it to print properly reliably. I think twice it has printed the drawing properly in all the times i have tried (a lot of times!). However there are drivers produced by a company called WinLine which are designed to enable old printers to work with modern systems. When i use this driver on XP it works perfectly. The only problem with these drivers is that it prints a great big watermark over the print unless you pay the £150 for the license. I'm thinking as there are Roland drivers specifically for Windows XP there must me a way of getting this to work. I'm sure i'm missing something! Ive tried it with a parallel to USB cable on XP in a virtual machine and parallel to parallel on a machine running XP natively.
I always wanted a plotter. Even in the era of laser printed perfection, there's something inherently satisfying in dragging pens across paper.
Inkscape is notorious for poor printing, on non-linux platforms at least. The customary solution is to export your image to pdf and then use a pdf reader to print it. I have no idea if this will work for your hardware.
Yeah plotters are great to watch! After some more experimentation I have found that It is trying to print in portrait. Every time I change the orientation in the settings it just changes back when it prints. Very frustrating!
Using Inkscape with Cutters/Plotters Sekonic Pen Plotter
Inkscape.org
Hi everyone,
I have a Sekonic SPL450 plotter that i am trying to get working with Windows XP and Inkscape so it can be displayed at a museum i volunteer at. It proving difficult!
The plotter is compatible with the Roland DXY drivers which i have installed on XP. I am using an old version of Inkscape to send the drawing to the plotter. The plotter will print the drawing i send sometimes on the first try when i switch everything on. Every time after that it will print as if the paper is in portrait so half missing or print in a strange low resolution mode. I cant seem to get it to print properly reliably. I think twice it has printed the drawing properly in all the times i have tried (a lot of times!). However there are drivers produced by a company called WinLine which are designed to enable old printers to work with modern systems. When i use this driver on XP it works perfectly. The only problem with these drivers is that it prints a great big watermark over the print unless you pay the £150 for the license. I'm thinking as there are Roland drivers specifically for Windows XP there must me a way of getting this to work. I'm sure i'm missing something! Ive tried it with a parallel to USB cable on XP in a virtual machine and parallel to parallel on a machine running XP natively.
Any help would be massively appreciated!
I always wanted a plotter. Even in the era of laser printed perfection, there's something inherently satisfying in dragging pens across paper.
Inkscape is notorious for poor printing, on non-linux platforms at least. The customary solution is to export your image to pdf and then use a pdf reader to print it. I have no idea if this will work for your hardware.
Yeah plotters are great to watch! After some more experimentation I have found that It is trying to print in portrait. Every time I change the orientation in the settings it just changes back when it prints. Very frustrating!