About Printing and Plotting

• From the File menu you can print with the following options: scaling, clipping, displaying the plot on the screen, or sending the plot directly to the printer. You can also print shaded images from this menu. You can create plot files of the current object (sketch, part, drawing, assembly, or layout) and send them to the print queue of a plotter. The plotting interface to HPGL and PostScript formats is standard.

• Use the Distributed Batch utility to create a command file of print or plot files without having to choose from the interactive menus. The command file contains a list of objects to plot. For example, you can submit the job at the end of a workday, and the plot files are created and plotted offline.

• Hidden lines appear as gray for a screen plot, but as dashed lines on paper.

• You cannot plot when the option Use Fast HLR is checked in the Environment dialog box.

• When Creo Parametric plots the system line fonts, it scales them to the size of a sheet. It does not scale the user-defined line fonts, which do not plot as defined.

You can use the configuration file option use_software_linefonts to make sure that the plotter plots a user-defined font exactly as it appears in Creo Parametric.

• With the CROSS SEC menu active, you can plot a cross section from Part or Assembly mode.

• You can write plot files in Calcomp, Gerber, HPGL2, and Versatec format.

• For the HPGL2 driver to print a screen capture of OLE objects, the printer must support the HP RTL extension.

You can configure your printer using the Printer Configuration dialog box, available from the Print dialog box. If you are printing a shaded image, the Shaded Image Configuration dialog box opens instead of the Printer Configuration dialog box.