Pens for HP 7475A plotter?

Sam Ismail &lt;dastar(a)wco.com&gt; wrote: Hmm, looks like HP discontinued all the pens and stuff in late 1995. They now suggest calling some other vendors who I guess may still make the pens. See http://www.hp.com/cposupport/plotters/support_doc/bpp01965.html for names and numbers. Or just go to http://www.hp.com, click on the "search" link, type in "plotter pens" and click the <mumble> button. That will get you to a bunch of documents of varying usefulness including the above. Sometimes you can turn up new-old-stock fiber-tip pens in the usual places (swap meet, with other old computer stuff, &c). NOS in this case means still sealed in a foil bag that has a "use by" date. I've no idea how well the pens keep past that date, but those are the sorts of things we used to use with the plotters in an office environment. What might be better at this point in time is to look for refillable drafting pens. I don't know, I've never tried to use those. As for software, the FAQ says that there are Win3.1 and Win95 printer drivers for these things! Imagine that...no, actually, I think I'd rather not. What the plotter really wants to see is called HP-GL; it's pretty much a command language with pen-motion primitives for drawing lines and text. I can't remember how much you could get it to do w/r/t shapes and filling or whether you had to do that on the computer side and turn it into an HP-GL sequence for the plotter. Check your ObClassic Graphics Package to see if it can spit out HP-GL. -Frank McConnell