Page 160 - Enhancing CAD Drawings with Photoshop

4386.book Page 144 Monday, November 15, 2004 3:27 PM

144 CHAPTER 5 PRESENTING PLANS

Limit the color depth that your ImagePrinter driver uses to create images to black and white pixels
only. This will make smaller image files and save hard drive space. To do so, follow these steps:
1. Expand the Graphics node in the driver hierarchy and click the Vector Graphics node. In the
Resolution And Color Depths group, click the Monochrome radio button, and then choose
2 Shades Of Gray from the Color Depth drop-down, as shown in Figure 5.7. Click OK to close
the Plotter Configuration Editor.

Figure 5.7
Limiting the color depth
of the output

2. Finally, click the Finish button in the Add Plotter wizard to create the ImagePrinter.pc3 file
on your hard drive.

Accessing Plotter Drivers
You can use AutoCAD’s PLOTTERMANAGER command to open Windows Explorer to the folder where your
plotter drivers are stored. In AutoCAD 2004 and 2005, these are typically stored under the following:
C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Application Data\Autodesk\AutoCAD 2005\
R16.1\enu\Plotters
This path assumes you are logged in as the administrator. You need to adjust this if you are logged in under
another account, by substituting your login name for Administrator in the path.
It is possible to set AutoCAD to store its print drivers in the location of your choosing. Use the OPTIONS
command, click the Files tab, and expand the Printer Support File node. Here you can set the Printer Con-
figuration Search Path.
When you create a custom paper size, it is stored in a Plotter Model Parameters file (.pmp). By default,
these files are stored in a PMP Files subfolder under the Plotters path mentioned earlier.