RockSim Template Printing-(I am failing)

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Scott Evil

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I'm trying to print out the nose cone and fin templates for a fairly large rocket in RS9. (five foot NC etc)

It's printing just fine but doing so in a full color olive drab that I set up for the 3D view and has just TKO'd my printer cartridges.

Thinking that I must be missing something, I called up the standard LOC Precision Lil Nuke file, left the 2D color blue, made the diffuse color white and printed just the nosecone template, same thing, all kinds of olive drab-ish ink going on the paper when all I want is a simple black and white outline for a template.

Could this be an RS8 setting conflicting with RS9 on my computer? Is this problem fixed in the patch I haven't been patient enough to deal with? Should I hang up rocketry and go back to Legos?

Is there a way to get .rkt file(s) onto a USB flash drive and have them printed on large enough paper at an Office Depot or something? ( that "I" may understand using RS9 on XP?)...This would work real well, If could get my stuff printed on some mondo sized paper, I could replace my printer ink and not need a 1/2 mile of scotch tape all in one trip.

I must have been some type of evil unscrupulous printer tycoon in a past life...

Thanx in advance for any ideas

Scott
 
What if you printed the template out to a pdf or other graphic file instead of an actual printer. You could save that to a usb drive. Not certain if Office Depot could print it, but an architectural/engineering print shop could.
 
Unfortunately I think that's just the way Rocksim does it. I have RS8, not 9 (I learned the work-arounds and don't really want to spend the money on the upgrade) but when I try to print templates in RS it prints them as solid gray.

Maybe change your printer settings to "print in black and white" and go that route?? Might save some ink, by only using the cheaper black ink instead of mixing the blue/yellow/red to make the greenish color...

Agree that you'd have to export your templates to another graphics program and then save them in a compatible file type to get them printed commercially at a store or print shop. Nobody else's system will recognize or be able to use the ".rkt" files or the Rocksim stuff "as-is" most likely.

The Rocksim 'printing feature' is rather primitive IMHO anyway-- I have tried everything under the sun, and even written to Tim about it, but I CANNOT get Rocksim to print centering ring templates with the "hole" in the center-- they are ALL SOLID GRAY DISKS. It's very frustrating, and one of the reasons why I won't pay the money to upgrade to RS9... for the money, the product could DEFINITELY be better in several different ways...

I'm glad they're adding features to RS, but I wish they'd solve some of the basic useability and compatibility problems with it FIRST... Like the way every time I go to launch Rocksim I get an error message saying the "link is out of date, would you like to update the directory now" and I click "yes" and it supposedly does, but never actually gets rid of the error message. It then takes about a minute or so before Rocksim actually decides to come up...

I asked Tim about that one too, and all I got was a "well, does it eventually come up??" (Yeah, I said) "Well, as long as its working, don't worry about it".

Sorry, but that's a blow-off, not an answer... VERY aggravating!

Good luck! OL JR :)
 
Luke S. ,

OK, I dunno how I missed this but I did anyway...:blush:

RS9 [current rocket design]/File/Print/Print selections...to right of print is another menu (see 1st pic below)

I called up a LOC Lil Nuke file and printed the fins with "Template Fill Color" selected to white and then printed a centering ring with the "Template Hole Fill Color" toggled a little grayer. Prints really nice usable simple black and white templates, see pic 2.

So, now I go try and print the aft centering of Crapien III with the same color parameters and I get printout(s) of a 8.625" circle with a simple cross hair in the middle, not the cluster that was intended (like pic 2)...Makes me wonder if I (for many reasons during the evolution of this build) labeled my aft centering ring as a "Bulkhead" and not a "Centering Ring"...Just thinking out loud on this theory. I'll check tomorrow when it's not so late in the morning.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Swampworks,

Is there a way to print "PDF Style" without having to put a parrot on my shoulder and repeatedly saying "aaaarg matey"?

Printing example1.jpg

PICT1688.jpg
 
Scott,

I see you are working in the wonderful windows environment so I may be able to help. If you can print the template(s) to a tif file, and send them to me, I should be able to switch them over to pdf. But then, in reality you could simply take a tif file to a printer and have it printed.

You should be able to select "Microsoft Office Document Image Writer" as the printer within the print setup. That will print the file to a tif.

If you'd rather a pdf, feel free to send me the file and I will convert it.

Ummmmmmm, couple of footnotes:

When you select the "image writer" as the printer, make sure you go in and select "custom size" paper and then define the hypethetical paper dimensions in the properties tab. Make sure the paper size is large enough to accomodate the template or you will buying more tape.
 
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Thanks Swawpworks, but where does the the .tiff file go? Kinda late for me now to keep looking so I'll look around some more later later.:caffeine:

Scott
 
Once you hit "print" you'll get a prompt asking what to name the file and the location to save it.
 
OK, really late now, my bad.:caffeine::caffeine:

I won't get all happy with descriptions but I don't get prompts for a save location, it just closes the window. MS Office came on my computer when I bought it but we pretty much ignored all the nags because we owned a copy of MS Works and that's all we needed at the time.

I'm guessing .tiff files fail because I don't have a functional version of Office. I've been known to wrong before (see thread start).

I DO have have a SAVE AS .tiff option in Paint Shop ProX...maybe I'll play with that bit and see what I can come with via screen shot size tweaking.

-12GMT...Suns too high up, gotta go...
 
I have rocksim 7 and if you can save to a compatible format, send me your rkt file and I will create the graphic file(s) and send them back, if you don't mind.
 
Thanks again for the offer Swampworks,

All I have is RS 8 and 9 on my computer. I suspect they both behave as RS9 but have yet to prove it.

The .rkt file is attached anyway.

When printed out on my end (minus the "fill color" ink eating monster), the fragmented copies DO come with targets for alignment. A roll of tape and a pair of scissors will indeed work just fine, just not as cool as the big ol' engineering printout that I "desired". All functional just the same.

It is unfortunate that the print functions in RockSim are not more universal.

View attachment Diary of a Crapien v1dotzero.rkt
 
Maybe I should create a duplicate design in Open_Rocket and see where that goes...just a thought...
 
Attached is the pdf of the NC template. Small file size kinda threw me for a loop, especially compared to the tif file I had to create to get here, but then this file actually has very little graphics to it.

Verified the dimensions in the pdf, so it looks like it worked.

I did learn a few things though, in the process. Wasn't as easy as I thought.......Apparently the "microsft image writer" has a 36" limit on the "sheet" it will produce the image on. So, I printed it to 2 of those "sheets" and then graphically merged the two using a real graphics application. That produced a tif file that was 63megs. Acrobat converted it to a pdf which was approx 750kb.

To make a long story, sh...........ummmmmm, well, not really short, eh? Anyway.....

View attachment Diary of a Crapien Nose.zip
 
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Wow THANK YOU!

2 pages is way better than 10. I'll run it a couple local print shops tomorrow.

BTW, I reference a longer NC before but had to shorten it up a bit for construction reasons.

Thanks again, Scott
 
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