Third Party Plotters

Hi everyone! I'm just posting to share some information we've gathered in the past week.

We started using Foxit as our standard PDF plot driver because when we used Adobe PDF and DWG to PDF for rendered plans, they created PDFs that looked good on the screen, but if you tried to physically print them, they would spool forever.

We recently decided to scrap Foxit because it handles colors unexpectedly. It seems to make them more saturated than we want. Another factor to consider is that when I have contacted Foxit for support, they have not been able to help because they don't know anything about AutoCAD.

We tried Bluebeam, which did well with color handling, but didn't handle pattern hatches well at all. Like totally blew it. This was with default settings- I did not attempt to change any settings to fix the issue.

AcroPlot and PDF995 are both good. They generate files with a similar size (larger than Foxit, but still reasonable), handle color well, and pattern hatches look good. We use SHX fonts, and text seems to come out better with these two plotters than it does with Foxit. Unfortunately, it seems that across the board, these two are plotting lineweights fatter than Foxit does.

I can also say that AcroPlot's support is great. I called them to troubleshoot a printing issue that, it turned out, originated with my Acrobat print settings. They were very knowledgeable (they knew about AutoCAD AND Acrobat! Be still my heart!) and patient when my mouse died in the middle of the call.