Installing Plotter via LPR Port

There is something I learned years ago that I thought won't be needed anymore given what I am doing day-to-day for the last 5 years. But as many times before, I was proven wrong.  Recently, my co-worker got a question where customer was unable to install a plotter and was unable to see it in the wizard. That got me an idea to revise what I have done before in my CAD management days working with Windows XP. Off course, lots of things have changed, such as that most of us live in Windows 7 era, which makes some things obsolete. Some things got moved around with the introduction of Windows Vista and Windows 7 but essentially the logic still reminded the same. See it after jump.

Newer versions of Windows use the standard TCP/IP Port by default for a network printer, but they still support LPR/LPD printing. If you want to know more about it you may click on that link. If not just skip it to see how you can install your, most likely, old printer onto LPR port you are about to create. The idea here is to have print job plot to a remote printer.

For the sake of this blog post I will use the plotter that I used for years (HP DesignJet 750C plotter) and that form the most part served us well, back in the days.  So the first step is to create the LPR port. This is all done within Control Panel, by following these steps:

1. Control Panel>Programs>Programs and Features>Turn Windows features on or off

2. In Windows Features dialog navigate to Print and Document Services and turn on LPR Port Monitor and click OK

   

3. Next step is to add Plotter. In Control Panel>Hardware and Sound>Devices and Printers and click Add a Printer

 4. Click Add a Local Printer and continue wizard

5. Then, you will see Chose a printer port prompt, select Create a new port and choose LPR Port (if you don’t see LPR port entry, that would indicate that you don’t have it enabled)

   

6. In Add LPR compatible printer add an IP address of your printer (i.e. 192.168.1.50) and add the name of the queue where you will be sending your information to. Print would work just fine.

7. This will launch Install Printer Driver dialog, if your printer exists you may select it and click next (program will install driver for you). If your printer is not listed here, like it's the case with HP DesignJet 750C plotter click Have Disk and click Next to browse to the location where your printer driver is downloaded (for this you will need help of your IT person, since it is probably located somewhere on your network).

8. Then give the name to the printer (HP DesignJet 750C plotter). This will install your printer driver after few moments.

9. Finally you will be asked whether to share this printer or not.

10. The last step is a prompt asking you if you want to set this as default plotter and if you want to print test page.

11. Your printer should be installed then you can create .pc3 files for your plotters to plot from AutoCAD Civil 3D.

Not that scary, huh?