Plotting More Quickly

When plotting to a printer, AutoCAD LT scans your drawing from top to bottom, processing horizontal strips of the drawing. For many printers, AutoCAD LT can save time by truncating trailing blank space from the right end of each horizontal strip. A drawing without border lines often can be processed more quickly than the same drawing with border lines. If a drawing has borders, you can speed up plotting by placing borders on a separate layer and turning them off before plotting.

Optimizing the System Printer

If you use the system printer, you may be able to speed up plotting performance by

For more information about these procedures, see your Windows documentation.

Optimizing Pen Motion

You often can minimize wasted pen motion and reduce plot time by optimizing, or increasing the efficiency of, your pens. For example, you can prevent the pens from retracing duplicate lines. Also, if your drawing uses many colors or widths, you can reduce the time needed to change pens by turning on pen sorting. This option causes AutoCAD to plot every object that uses a particular pen before switching to another pen.

AutoCAD LT offers an appropriate optimization level based on the current plotter. In the Optimizing Pen Motion dialog box, each successive option you check under No Optimization adds cumulatively to the optimization level. The last two options, which eliminate overlapping vectors, can save time if your drawing includes many overlapping lines.

In some cases, optimizing can be counterproductive, depending on the speed of the computer, the plotter, and the plotter's pen change mechanism. The pen sorting option generally has no effect on raster printers. It is not available for the Windows system printer.

Adjusting the Appearance of Truetype Fonts

You can increase plotting speed by reducing the resolution and fill of Truetype and Type 1 fonts.