Choosing a printer driver

Depending on the printer that you will use, you have several choices when choosing the printer driver best suited for your needs.

If your printer uses a windows-based driver designed especially for your device, you can use the Windows Printer. This selects a printer driver (default “printer.plt”) that interfaces with the Windows 98 or Windows NT/2000 system printer driver setup. Usually, if you are printing in a network environment, this driver should be used.
If your printer is a Post Script-based device or supports Post Script printing, there are several drivers especially for that purpose.
If your printer supports HPGL/RTL printing and you will be printing design files containing both vector and raster information, you should use one of the available printer drivers intended for printers that support HPGL/RTL.
For producing output that is strictly raster, you can use a RIP driver — "ripwin32_gray8.plt" or "ripwin32_rgb24.plt" — for gray-scale and 24-bit RGB color printing, respectively.

The RIP driver files are used to generate a raster version of the printed area of the design file. During this process, vectors are “burned” into the underlying background or the underlying raster images. This produces a final result that is a purely raster interpretation of the design file with all vector information converted into raster.

Other considerations are whether or not your printer is connected to a network or connected directly to your system via a parallel or serial port. You should take into account, also, whether or not you will print directly to the printer or first create the print as a file on disk before submitting it to the printer. See also Selecting a printer.

You may not need to customize or modify the printer driver. MicroStation includes more than 35 sample printer drivers in the "…\Workspace\system\plotdrv" directory. It is likely that you will find a printer driver that either is intended for, or works with, your printer.

Once you determine the category of printer driver that you need, you can select an appropriate driver (see Printer Driver Selection Guide). For some printers that have both monochrome and color models, there are both color and monochrome versions of the driver.