Plotter Paper & Supplies
WAB Paper Supply
Plotter Paper and Plotter Equipment News
Plotter Printing generally refers to wide format printing, particularly of blueprints and CAD drawings. Plotter printers started out as vector printers - large paper rollers provided the X-axis motion and a pen arm moved back and forth to provide the y-axis motion. Pen plotters are capable of rendering very complex drawings, but are slow in doing so because of the limited degree of freedom of the pen. Pen plotters do not make solid or raster graphics, but can simulate them by making hatched lines very close together. One of the advantages of pen plotters is that the files they read are very small compared to raster graphics. In the early days of computers, when memory and processing power was at a premium, pen plotter printers were often the best tool for creating large scale high resolution color vector graphics efficiently.
As computing power and printing technology have improved, old fashioned pen plotters have become nearly obsolete, being replaced by wide format inkjet printers and LED toner based printers (still commonly referred to as plotters), which print in raster format, although they still understand old plotter vector files, because of the advantages in file size and speed, and their ability to be written as simple text files. One way in which old fashioned plotters are still employed is replacing the pen with a blade and using the plotter to cut fabric, signs, stickers or other material.
Technology keeps improving blueprinting and plotter printing processes with the advent of online planrooms, digital blueprint archiving, and other technologies making life easier for engineers, architects, contractors, and everyone involved with printing of wide format technical drawings. Other recent advances in plotter printing include environmentally friendly plotter paper, such as AZON Environmental Bond Plotter Paper, which contains 30% recycled material and is produced using less energy, less water, less trees, and remits less green house gases, yet performs equally in quality, brightness, weight & ink penetration as virgin plotter paper.
As computer and printing technology continue to evolve and environmental concerns become more pressing, the plotter printing and plotter paper industry as we know it will continue to change. To learn more about cutting edge solutions in plotter paper and plotter printing, contact WAB Paper Supply, plotter paper supplier to architectural and engineering firms around the country as well as agencies like NASA and the US Military.