Opinion / Recomendation please for HP 500 42" Drivers

I am using a HP DesignJet 500 42" w/ HPGL2 card and JetDirect with ACAD Land
Desktop 3. We always use 36" roll media because the vast majority of our
plots are 24" x 36". The HP 500 is shared through a Win2000 server to
Win2000 and XP machines. Last week I updated the HP 500 firmware to A.02.10
and the drivers to v5.35, in hopes of ridding our system of SPOOLSV errors,
believed to be coming from the HP v5.01 driver. While editing .pc3 files I
discovered that the v5.35 drivers do not appear to include both (portrait)
and (landscape) entries for each paper size in the list. This caused a
plotting problem where all plots came out of the plotter lengthwise leaving
12" of blank paper to the left (top) of the plot. I tried using the rotate
options on both the front panel and in the driver to no avail. I edited the
..pc3's in all manners possible with no positive results. After switching
back and forth between the old (v5.01) and new (v5.35) drivers, I realized
the only way to plot across the 36" width of the roll was to revert back to
the v5.01 drivers. However, I believe the v5.01 drivers are a bit buggy and
are causing SPOOLSV errors on the Win2000 and XP machines.

My questions:
What drivers are people having success with?
Are there other drivers available the have both (portrait) and (landscape)
but don't cause SPOOLSV errors?
Is there a way to add the (portrait) and (landscape) options to the new
drivers?

Any comments or suggestions are appreciated.

Thanks,
Ralph

 

I think I see the problem you are having. You want to toggle the "Rotate by
90 Degrees" option in the plotter driver, but the custom settings in the PC3
file does not allow that option. Your objective is to plot a landscape
oriented drawing to a 36" wide roll with the height (length) being 24". Your
custom sheet size defines the orientation. Thus your sheet size must be
36"x24" as you have done. If you now want to plot a 24" x 36" portrait
oriented drawing to the same 36" roll, your custom sheet size is still 36x24
but you need to rotate the cadd output by 90 degrees to orient the portrait
to fit the 36" roll. I see no way to do this using the PC3 file without
having the rotate option available.

I'll have bow out on this one Ralph.