Heidi drivers

I need Heidi driver for the following printer / plotter

1) HP 1050C Plotter

2) HP 8500 Color Laser

Anyone know of a source?

 

Why?

The best way to set these up is as a Windows System Printer.

 

Not if you want a device/os independent .pc3 file right?

 

I have always used the system printer option when setting up my printers however 2005 has made a change that make this not work for me. We work primarily in Metric but print to english size paper. That has never been a problem in the past. However Autodesk has removed the units ratio buttons from the plot dialog box in release 2005. They say that the paper size in the PC3 file is supposed to drive the plotting units. The only way to make this work is to make custom paper sizes that are metric based on the ansi sizes (A,B,C,D,E). For the 1050C, the system printer driver does allow custom metric paper sizes but they are named custom1, custom2, etc. there is no way to make them uniquely named (ie A-Size Horizontal, etc).
The Heidi drivers do allow for uniquely named custom paper sizes, however I have found from the HP site that neither printer has a Heidi driver available!

To see more of this problem and Autodesk responces lokk at the following thread.

Discussion Groups Index > AutoCAD Groups > AutoCAD 2005 > Acad 2005 PC3 file change

 

I have the original HP download in my driver archive. Email me and I send
them to ya.

 

I would love to email you for any heidi files you have but there is no email address here for me to use.
I have searched the HP web site for these but with no luck.
Are you sure that you have HDI drivers for the printers I mentioned? If so that is great but if HP is not making them any more who did?

Todd

 

His email address from the NNTP post. HTTP does not show email
addresses.

 

Hello,

For AutoCAD 2000 and forward any HDI drivers for HP are already installed
with AutoCAD. The rest is based on optimized system drivers. So there are
no HDI drivers for DesignJets like the 800, 105x, or 5000 line.

Hope this helps.

Bud Schroeder
AutoCAD Test Development
Autodesk Inc.

email address here for me to use.

that is great but if HP is not making them any more who did?

 

A 650, 750, or 755 Heidi driver will work fine for a 105x series. Not sure
about 800 or 5x00 series.

 

Hello,

Yes you can use the older drivers for the 105x but then you loose the
optimization that HP has turned on with the system drivers. HDI is intended
for legacy devices.

Hope this helps.

Bud Schroeder
AutoCAD Test Development
Autodesk Inc.

 

I just downloaded new Win 2000 drivers for my laser printers (hp 5 Si and Hp 8500). It appears that these drivers do have the ability to make custom pagesetups (although one clashes out when you try it, have put in support request to HP on that one).

My work around for the toggle button missing is going to have to be as follows.

1) create PC3 files for each page size used, metric and english. In these PC3 files specify custom properities for the printer to make metric page sizes for ansi a and b (for the laser printer) and ansi a thru e for the plotter.

2) create pagesetups to use each of these PC3 files and force my users to use them (yeah right!). There can be no more quick prints by just specifying a printer and making changes in the plot box (unless the drawing is english).

3) If I can not solve the issue of the crashing driver not allowing me to select metric for custom paper size (HP 8500) then I will have to revert to the older driver that does not allow custom paper sizes. To work around that I will have to make many pagesetups that are scale dependant (ie 1=25.4, 1=50.8, 25.4=1) for our most used metric scale so that my user do not have to think but so much in getting a plot out. Include in the pagesetup name something like Metric 1:1, Metric 1:2, Metric 2:1, etc.

4) If the user ends up is some vendor drawing or a drawing they did not start with my templates they will have to import the pagesetups to be able to print metrically on english paper. The easiest way I have for doing this is to included the pagesetups in my format blocks so the user can just insert a format and inherit the setups.

Ok this seems like a lot of work for me to have to do just because someone decided to remove a simple toggle button!!
If it was JUST AutoCAD I needed to worry about I would skip this release in the hopes of a fix in the next. However most of my users are using mechanical and electrical so I need to give the access to the newer features of ever new release that i can and since these are AutoCAD based I have no choice. THANKFULLY Inventor is not effected by this or I would be screaming.

PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE fix this SOON!

 

I use both heidi and system drivers (at least I think I do, looking back,
the whole set up process has me baffled, I should have written it down.
Anyway, at least from my memory what I say below is correct).

The heidi driver is slower but seems to have a better output for images &
such.

E

 

You'll find that if you are using most Windows system printers, AutoCAD uses
ggdi8.hdi and diplot8.hdi to communicate with the system driver. Although
there is a "hdi" driver involved, you are still using a system driver in
this case.

The newer HP DesignJets use an optimized Windows system driver which causes
their hpgdi8.hdi to be loaded, but when using this you are still plotting to
a Windows system driver.

In both cases, an addition clue is that the list of "Windows Driver Files"
is not empty when a system driver is in use, but it will be empty when a
pure hdi driver is used.

The only "pure" hdi drivers are those which don't have "gdi" in their names.