Archive for the ‘Paper’ Category
Small Problems, Big Consequences
In any endeavor there is often one key item that can bring everything to a grinding halt. When you’re on your way to work in the morning that item is your car key, for example. If you can’t locate your keys, everything comes to a grinding halt and you aren’t able to drive to work, despite the big shiny car parked in the driveway. Oh sure, you can call a taxi, but that’s not going to get you there on time, and it’s going to be an expensive work-around. If you run a small retail operation, there are any number of little things that could interrupt the day’s activities.
Of course, like your car keys, if you can’t find the door keys to open up shop for the day, business is going to be a little slow, at least until you can get inside, but let’s assume that you are able to get the doors open, flip the sign over to “open,” and be ready for customers. Running out of inventory will certainly put a damper in the day’s receipts, even if it’s just one popular item that is out of stock.
Speaking of the day’s receipts, if you run out of thermal paper for the cash register, then you’re not going to be able to ring up any sales either. If that happens, you do have two choices to fix the problem, though. You can close up and run down to a business supplies stores and pay twice your regular price for a few thermal paper rolls for the register. That’s inconvenient and expensive – especially when you consider the lost business while you’re closed. Your second option is to use manual receipts, write out each sale by hand, and do your best not to make any math errors. This won’t kill you, but will certainly slow things down as customers are entertained watching you try to calculate sales tax percentages.
Then, there’s paper for the credit card machine. This one has no work around, if you aren’t able to print credit card authorization slips, then you aren’t able to accept credit card purchases. Your best bet here is to put a sign in the window so customers without cash know not to even bother walking in the door. Nobody likes turning away business, but until you get the credit card machine up and running again, there aren’t a lot of choices.
The funny thing about these little items is that they are all tiny little, seemingly unimportant items when gauged against the overall business. Like the expensive car waiting in the driveway with keys, the problem item represents only the tiniest fraction of the value of the whole enterprise, and it’s something that goes practically unnoticed when everything is working well. When it’s missing, though, the consequences can be very large , indeed.
Engineering Plotters
One of the largest printers that is in common use in the United States today is called the engineering plotter. The name comes from the way the pen tip is guided as it creates its drawings. The pen itself moves back and forth along the Y axis while the entire Y axis assembly moves back and forth along the X axis of an imaginary two dimensional graph. Positioning a point on a graph with the use of X, Y coordinates is known as plotting the point. Similarly, the engineering plotter printer, plots each point where ink is required in order to make a drawing.
The engineering plotter was developed to make very large drawings of complex design drawings. The large physical size of the drawing enables the person reading the drawing to see important details easily in a work environment without additional magnification.
Engineering plotters, because of the large size of the drawings they create, use special oversized plotter papers. These drawings once completed are often so large that to transport them from place to place with the risk of damaging them, they are rolled up and inserted into rigid cardboard tubes. The same method is often used with architectural drawings and blue prints.
Information about where to draw lines is fed into the engineering plotter from a computer. The engineer or graphic artist who is making the drawing uses a Computer Aided Drawing (CAD) program to create the drawing directly on the computer. The computer screen lets the drawer zoom in and use other electronic enhancement features to create fine detail and rich surface textures that can give a realistic appearance to the drawn renderings.
In addition to engineering applications, plotters are often used for large drawings for other uses as well. Marketing graphics such as the artwork used on the outside of product cartons or even banners for display at trade shows or sales events may be created using a special kind of plotter printer.
Engineering plotters are generally large expensive machines used by companies rather than individuals. They are often kept in a separate printer room and shared through a network by all those with need to access it for large drawings. Manufacturing facilities that frequently make new products or prototypes are among the largest segment of engineering plotter users, often making drawing sets for the fabricators and production engineers to allow them to create the new product that has been designed. These types of drawings are often called working drawings and may be marked up with production notes and other handwritten edits as they are used for the initial production. These edits will be fed back to the engineer who will review them and make modifications to the original drawings as appropriate.