Printer And Plotter Design

There was a time where there was a clear delineation between a printer and a plotter, or rather we could say a plotter was a type of printer that was very commonly used to print high quality large maps and diagrams. Now this function is being performed by other printers, but plotters do still exist. It is sometimes the case that a large, standard type printer is termed a plotter, due to its ability to perform the same task at a larger scale to its smaller printer cousins, but it is not using the same mechanical process.

Plotters are quite distinct from the other type of printers because they moved a physical pen across the paper. This means that they are not particularly good at creating images such a photographs, indeed this would take a plotter an extremely long time and the output would be very low quality. Plotters were very good at printing non-raster art though – line art. This type of art was more commonly used in the 80s and 90s but has phased out slightly. It is still used a lot in the design and construction industry.

Plotters were great when processing power and memory of printers was scarce and expensive. It was cheaper to have a printer with a mechanical arm than it was to build a printer which could handle the (at the time) huge sizes of memory required to process raster art. Therefore anything over the size of A4 would typically go to a plotter for processing.

Nowadays though, the pen plotter is obsolete. We can perform the same functions using a large inkjet-based printer, this has now become a far more sensible option. However the plotter legacy remains, as the languages used to send the details of a vector image to a plotter is the same computer language used today. This is because the vector languages are much more efficient than sending full raster data to a printer, or storing it on a computer.

Plotters are still used in some other niche industries, but the pen has usually been replaced by a knife or tool of some sort. Therefore the plotter is used to cut or form physical materials into shapes in a methodical manner. Any larger scale projects are handled by assembly lines and it is only now in art that we tend to see pen-based plotters being used for their interesting output.

By: Mark J Gregory

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Mark Gregory is writing on behalf of Digiprint Express, who offer colour poster printing and Large format poster printing.