Help with Printing to a Plotter

[timnosenzo]

We have a plotter on the network where I work, and I can't seem to get my Mac to print to it properly. I set up the IP address and the printers queue, and I can send a print job to it, but I can't seem to specify that I want it to print on the large format paper.

For instance, I am trying to print out a long Excel spreadsheet. My brain tells me that the easiest way to do this would be to tell Excel that I want to print landscape... and I want to fit the height for how tall the paper is (I believe 34") and I want the length to be as long as it has to be to fit (cause its a plotter, and it can cut the paper where ever it wants). Unfortunately, there seems to be no way to do this. I was able to get it to work on my PC though *gasp*.

When I do send a job to the printer, it prints out on the 11x17 paper, not on the plotter paper.

So any tips on how to work this out? Unfortunately I'm not very familiar with this kind of printing. If it helps, the plotter is a Lanier LW310
http://www.lanier.com/page.php/5.1.6.4

Thanks for any help you can offer!

 

[Macky-Mac]

have you tried creating a custom sized page to print on? you could figure out how big the sheet has to be by checking the page breaks when you do a page set-up for any standard sized page

 

[MisterMe]

We have a plotter on the network where I work, and I can't seem to get my Mac to print to it properly. .... I was able to get it to work on my PC though *gasp*.

When I do send a job to the printer, it prints out on the 11x17 paper, not on the plotter paper.

...

My research on your plotter shows that Lanier has no out-of-the-box support for MacOS/MacOS X. It supports only Novell NetWare and various versions of Windows. The company has an optional PostScript module, which I presume will work with your Mac. However, you will need a LW310-specific PPD file. Whether or not Lanier explicitly supports the Mac, the PPD file should work even if it has to be extracted from a Windows installation package. At any rate, exactly how are you communicating between your Mac and this plotter? With seemingly no Mac support, you seem to have accomplished more than anyone can reasonably expect.

 

[timnosenzo]

Thanks for your help!

have you tried creating a custom sized page to print on?

I did try that, didn't seem to work though. It still fed the 11x17.

At any rate, exactly how are you communicating between your Mac and this plotter? With seemingly no Mac support, you seem to have accomplished more than anyone can reasonably expect.

The plotter is hooked up to a Windows XP that runs the print software, and acts as the queue. I map to the queue and print to it. I guess my next step should be to call the Lanier support techs and see if its even possible, before I pull my hair out over it....