Acad 14 : large solid colour/black rectangles appear randomly on plots 1

[bumble]

We have had this problem for a long time now but have been able to work around it by binding( inserting as block and exploding ) xrefs to drawings. We feel ( but we could be all wet )that the phenomenon usually occurs when Xrefs that contain polylines with width or dimension "blocks" ie leaders with arrowheads;-which are tapered polylines? are inserted into drawings. Moreover it happens when xrefs are nested i.e. Drawing A is xrefed into drawing B which inturn is Xrefed into drawing C. When i say that the occurrance of these solid rectangles is random what i mean is that some drawing elements ( particularily those that are blocks in the xref drawing ) will transform into these rectangular blobs whereas simlilar elements in the same drawing will not.Our plotter is a HP 750 Cplus and we have the most up-to-date driver installed. Has anyone out there witnessed this phenomenon?...the beers are on me if someone can help. Thanks

 

[shadow]

I have seen it happen before as well normally it hase to do with a hatch or a wipe out in the parent drawing or one of the child drawings i have also seen short wide plines do the same thing the only way that i have found to get around it was to either wblock that xref or drawing out to a new drawing and if i have Acad Map handy run its drawing clean up routines to remove short plines and or run recover on the drawing also the other way was if you have or know someone with Acad 2000 have them open the drawing run recover and save back to an R14 drawing or even R14 dxf file this should get rid of those pesky dark block shapes in your plots

One other thing though i have recently seen where a bad parallel cable has cause some random stuff in prints so if your plotter is connected to a computer via Parallel port and is using a cable longer than 6 foot you might try a different method of connecting to the plotter

 

[bumble]

Shadow,
Thanks for your tips ..i will pass on to drawing office manager. It is good to know someone else has witnessed similar problems as even our local Acad dealer couldn't shed some light on what was happening...at least we are not going MAD!!! Fortunately our plotter is on the network so we don't have he parallel cable problems. Thanks again
Bumble