Plotters with Mac OS X and iFamily

General discussion of iFamily for Leopard and Genealogy
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dellis247
Posts: 4
Joined: Wed Aug 26, 2009 3:03 pm
Location: Madison, AL USA

Plotters with Mac OS X and iFamily

Post by dellis247 » Fri Aug 28, 2009 3:11 pm

Hello!

Looking for some advise regarding an OLD plotter. I acquired an IOLine LP-4000 pen plotter from a brother-in-law recently. He purchased it, along with an old IBM PC around 1990 to produce CAD drawings. His business didn&#39t go well and the plotter ended up in the basement collecting dust for the past 20 years.

Brought it home, cleaned it up, fired it up and it successfully ran through the self tests. I&#39ve contacted IOLine and found that parts (and pens( are still available, so now I need to figure out the Mac connection and interface to iFamily.

The DB25 serial should be easy to convert to DB9 (I have the pin-out diagrams), and I was thinking that a USB-2-Serial adapter would handle the rest, but I believe this plotter only understands commands specific to plotters, so PDF files are probably going to have to be converted (ripped), and I doubt the Mac will see it as a "printer".

If anyone has experience with plotters, I would sure appreciate any advise you may offer. Replacing the plotter is not an option, given the cost of a new plotter. I was simply hoping to put this one to some good use creating our iFamily charts.

Dave Ellis
Madison, AL USA

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