Paint driver for HP plotters?

[Tim Martin; FSO; Soil Sciences]

Doug,
 
> > 1. Does GRASS have drivers for HP plotters?  Am I once again missing
> >    something obvious?  :) 
> > 2. Is anyone using either of these plotters to do GRASS stuff?
> >    If so, what are your impressions, etc?
> > 3. Can anyone recommend other plotters, in a similar price range?
> >    I can get the HP's at between $5000 and $9000 Canadian; my 
> >    budget can handle only the low end of the range.
 
> Did anyone respond to your query ?  I also am looking at options for
> hardcopy output of raster images.  Please let me know if you got any
> useful feedback.....
 
Yes, and once again I was missing something obvious.  :) Apparently
(though I haven't yet had time to test things) the way to do it
is using the MapGen facilities, which are a part of the related
stuff, or the grass garden, or whatever: a separate package that
does the job very well, so there's no need to rewrite it for 
GRASS.  That's the thing to use for vector files, to be printed
to plotters.  For raster files, you need some kind of printer,
instead of a plotter, and the tool to use is either a print driver,
or the pgmplus tools for converting raster images in a gazillion
ways. Again, the pgmplus tools are useful extras that work well
with GRASS. 

People did have opinions on plotters too, and those were helpful.
But I still haven't bought anything, or looked very hard yet.
The one HP I was hoping for, the paintjet-based one, is only
black and white, while I need a colour thing, so I am stuck with
a pen plotter of some kind, if I want to stay in my budget range
but still have E-size paper.

Tim.