Tips on Using Corel Draw with the Plotter
by Susan Delap

1. After clicking Print, printer status window (on computer) says "Spooling" indefinitely, and file never gets to the plotter. My file was just too complex. I tried blowing up a small 72dpi photograph to fit on a 11' wide poster. Then I added about 10 boxes with transparent backgrounds over the bitmap background. The Corel Draw book says you may have trouble printing if you use transparent backgrounds. They recommend merging the transparency effect with the underlying bitmap. I tried this--big mistake. The resulting bitmap became huge--about 150 MB, easily exceeding the plotters 72MB max memory. So I got rid of the transparent backgrounds and used a solid fill. Which got me past the Spooling problem and on to the next problem.

2. Items missing from output. I sent my file to the plotter OK, and I didn't see any "Out of Memory" message displaying on plotter front panel, but items were missing from the output. My file was still too complex. Don't know why the Out of Memory message did not trigger. It looked like the last box I added to my poster, which just happened to be the first one that should have printed out, just didn't print. All that printed was the background. When I printed the poster at a smaller size (36" wide instead of 11') it printed fine. Somehow when the poster was blown up to full size, the file got bigger. So I deleted the big underlying bitmap, and created a bunch of pieces of the bitmap and pasted them in. Then it printed fine.

3. Problems with drop shadows. I created a fancy text effect with a corresponding drop shadow. This was enough to prevent an 8' poster from printing. If you have a small poster, this may not be a problem.