If you haven’t already been bombarded by online ads, email and print ads you might not know that DraftSight is out of the ‘beta’ phase now. I have talked about this before (see http://wnc-swug.weebly.com/1/post/2010/11/draftsight-beta-ii.html) and decided that I should check it out and give an update to my previous observations.
After downloading and installing I immediately opened a drawing and tried to print to our OkiData C8800 laser printer. I chose to print the extends scaled to fit the paper size which I set at 11 x 17. Took a look at the preview and crossed my fingers and clicked the print button. The printer churned for a few seconds and then proceeded to print out an 11 x 178 sheet of paper that was completely blank except for a small solid black rectangle on one corner…déjà vu !
I couldn’t believe that this product was allow to leave the beta phase with this obvious glitch. I retreated to the user’s forum on the DraftSight support page and found that I wasn’t the only person that was having print problem. On the forum there were the usual workarounds like saving as a PDF and then printing the PDF which I found somewhat humorous. But then I saw a post in which the author says to uninstall the beta version before installing the new version. At first I thought this would be ineffective as during the install it appeared that the older version was uninstalled. I even went to the control panel and verified that I only had one version of DraftSight installed.
But since I had some free time on my hands I decided to give it a try. After uninstalling I ran the CCleaner registry cleaner and let it remove all the bogus entries from the registry (always do a backup of the registry) . I then rebooted the machine just to be on the safe side. Once DraftSight was installed again I was able to print the same drawing I tried before correctly.
In light of this I can take back some of my criticism of the program, if I can only now find a way to do a DXFOUT of selected entities I would be completely happy with the program.
If you haven’t tried the program give it a try, If you have tried and wish to try the production version make sure you uninstall the beta version first.
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