Architectural Printing Services

Printing Services

What to expect and how to work with your print shop

Printed on paper

Cad and blueprint printing services are numerous and easy to find in almost any city.  So quality and responsiveness has to be the next thing to look for.  As someone who utilizes printing services quite often, I run into stumbling blocks with different printer services. Where your typical home or office based printer solutions have pretty much been solved, print shops are a completely different animal.

Print shop availability is as easy to find as doing a quick internet search.  What you're looking for are the independent places.  I'm always surprised when I specifically tell clients to go to a specific print shop and they still go to the much more expensive office supply stores.  Steer away from your big name office supply stores that will charge over $1 - $2 per sheet.

For one, you have people running the presses for you who want to stay in business and get your repeat business.  They will  use your PDF files from your Cad program.  Versus buying your own wide format printer, there is a huge cost savings in outsourcing your printing which makes this service cost effective.  Unfortunately, They will not be versed in your style of drafting to know if something is off, it always takes a few prints with the printer to make sure everything goes well.  That means getting the print shop your drawings and swinging by to make sure the quality is where you want it to be.

Since I moved to JAX Beach, I have tried several printers.  Aimhere.net has been very quick and willing to work with me on keeping my print quality high at a reasonable cost.  Sure, we could do everything on their ink jet printers, which would insure near perfect matching, though there are not a lot of Contractors who want to pay $0.70 per sq ft. on their drawings.  So an economical option is to use their production printer (I like their series 8000 printer after converting my PDF’s to tiffs).  It’s an interesting process. I assumed all PDF’s were universal, though that remains to be seen.  This is due because PDF printing is based on the creating machine’s setup & program that originally exported (printed) the CAD files to PDF.  Then the machine that reads them and how the printer is set up to see fills and hatches.  Converting the PDF’s to a tiff file format seems to save the original fills & hatches.

Screen shot from CAD

Check out the images in this post.  Specifically looking at the shading on the images.  These are a little more detailed for construction drawings.  For large scale client presentations, these look fantastic and give a scale of depth to an otherwise boring 2 dimensional drawing.

sddrawings.com