Inkjet printers (slightly OT)

On 01/11/2015 10:57, J. Clarke wrote:
In article ,
says...


You probably already know this, but if you're scaling from printout and
the dimensions are all critical, scan and print a piece of commercially-
printed graph paper and check the result--if it's off then you'll have
an idea of what you have to do to compensate.


You mean because the printer may stretch or squeeze in the "paper feed"
direction compared to the transverse direction. I agree. In my case, I
am typically looking at prints of scans of blueprints so there are
several opportunities for this error, although print borders sometimes
have scales on both axes. In my present exercise, I have mostly been
scaling dimensions which are parallel to a quoted dimension on the
drawing, so this is less of an issue.

On Fri, 6 Nov 2015 20:46:51 +0000, newshound
wrote:

On 01/11/2015 10:57, J. Clarke wrote:
In article ,
says...


You probably already know this, but if you're scaling from printout and
the dimensions are all critical, scan and print a piece of commercially-
printed graph paper and check the result--if it's off then you'll have
an idea of what you have to do to compensate.


You mean because the printer may stretch or squeeze in the "paper feed"
direction compared to the transverse direction. I agree. In my case, I
am typically looking at prints of scans of blueprints so there are
several opportunities for this error, although print borders sometimes
have scales on both axes. In my present exercise, I have mostly been
scaling dimensions which are parallel to a quoted dimension on the
drawing, so this is less of an issue.

I used to use my Epson 3800 to print CAD generated drawings. I found
the prints were accurate to a fraction of a millimetre anywhere on an
A2 size sheet. The biggest cause of error was the stability of the
paper in that depending on the paper prints could fractionally change
dimensions over night.

I expect this to be the case with most high quality printers.
--

Regards,

Eric Stevens