TurboFLOORPLAN Public Forum

I am new to TFP and fairly new to CAD. (I'm an old pencil user).  I have been using SoftPlan for about a year and find my local print shop wants my plans in .plt format for plotting.

I have the HP GL/2 plotter drivers installed. For the SoftPlan plotting I can go throught the print function and print to file saving in the .plt format.

When I try that with TurboFloor I get through the entire process then it won't print to a file. Messages come up re .bmp and or operation not enabled.

What's up??

davgail,

What are you trying to print?  The GL/2 plotter drivers, I believe, are only for vector printing.  If the image is composed of color fills and rendered views then you would need to use raster printing driver.  That is why it asks if you want to save as a .bmp.  You might want to check with your print shop.  Most will accept .pdf files and that seems to be the most common file type everyone uses.  If they don't have that ability it might be time to find a new one.

Hope this is of help,
MCP

MCP
Thanks for the reply. I went through the exercise again and found you are no doubt correct. The actual wording is "This device no capable of transferring bitmaps" I assume that is referring to the GL/2 plotter. I am trying to print/plot what I thought was a simple 2D drawing in TFP, but I guess the program works in bitmap images.

I checked with the printer and they can work with PDF. How do I  get the drawing it into PDF?

Thanks
Dave

Dave,

If you have Adobe's Acrobat (not the reader) you can print to a .pdf.  If you don't then I suggest trying out PDF995 (www.pdf995.com).  It's quite capable and inexpensive if you decide to buy.  After you install it, all you have to do is select the print driver that it loads and it will then create a PDF file instead of printing it out.

Let us know how it works out for you,
MCP

MCP
Wow.... That was the EASY button. Cheap, painless, and works like a charm.

Thanks
Dave

Another excellent PDF "printer" and free and no advertisements is PDFCreator...I use it all the time

go to sourceforge.net and search for it

lots of other free programs (thousands) so look for other stuff too as needed

Doug.S

Just to add my two cents...I tried both Primo pdf and Cute pdf (both are free and enable creating pdf files). I found that Primo pdf did a poor job with TurboFloorPlan (altough it works well with other software.) Cute pdf worked well but the line where not dark (faded).

Marishka

As I recall PDFCreator got a bad rap because it seemed like it wanted to add-on other advertising stuff or toolbar...too bad and it can happen if user does not read the install options carefully.

So Allan found another free app PDF24.  I use that too as it has an easy multi-page editor...for example delete unwanted pages. Otherwise I find it is not quite as easy as PDFCreator...which can be set to display the .pdf file when saved (or not; your choice)....and now has an added editor but it does not work well yet so I leave it un-installed and use PDF24 for simple edits.
Both get updates now and then with improvements.

There are more free programs for extensive .pdf file editing but I have not needed any so far.

I realize this is not a software debugging forum but I tried the Software995 pdf creator and get a consistent failure when I try to create a pdf by printing to the PDF995 driver.

The message on the second page of the pdf is always:

ERROR: limitcheck
OFFENDING COMMAND: string
STACK:
111684
/mystring
24
448
37228

Any thoughts?

Thanks

Just to add my two cents...I tried both Primo pdf and Cute pdf (both are free and enable creating pdf files). I found that Primo pdf did a poor job with TurboFloorPlan (altough it works well with other software.) Cute pdf worked well but the line where not dark (faded).

Marishka

Thanks Dave I got it working thanks to your post.