During an effort to find a digital printing service to print the images from A Poverty of Desire I noticed how most of their staff refer to digital printing machines, Hewlett-Packard or Epson, though most of the ones I have seen in use are the former brand, as plotters.
These devices have a real and proper name—printers. Plotters are the devices used to draw lines, mostly black, using hollow-tipped inkpens, on paper for use by architects, engineers and other users of CAD software products. Lines, in black, to produce linear output. Not continuous tone four, six or seven colour output of photographs and images.
Yet another example of where the locals get entirely the wrong grasp of things and substitute a perfectly good, perfectly accurate name for something with a word that means something entirely different. Epson and Hewlett-Packard call these things printers, never plotters, because they know what a plotter really is.
Instead, in discussion with people in these bureaus, they insist that these machines are plotters, not printers, and they make plots, not prints, and make a big deal about that as if it is self-evident.
“We use a plotter, not a printer,” they will tell you.
“Well then, what is the difference between a printer and a plotter?” you ask.
“Err, I don’t know, but they are different,” they stress.
What are they on? Is this another version of the voodoo understanding of technology?
6:52:06 AM 
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