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It seems as though we’ve been hearing about a paperless society for decades now, and we’re barley any closer that we were when all the hype started. About the only paper we use less these days than we did ten or twenty years ago is paper money. The debit card means we don’t need to carry around stack of cash anymore, but other technologies that were supposed to help reduce our use of paper may have even had the opposite effect.

Even the ATM and cash registers that accept our debit cards in lieu of paper money spit out thermal paper receipts. If you think about the net use of paper over the long term, paper money gets passed back and forth and used hundreds of times in the ultimate recycling effort. Using our debit cards instead of paper money at convenience stores, gas pumps, restaurants, and everywhere else that we use them, results in all those little machines kicking out paper receipts and going through countless thermal paper rolls each day. That’s paper that’s used one and then tossed into the garbage.

Another of the innovations that was supposed to take us into the paperless era was the office email. Instead of writing out memos to be distributed to co-workers, we can now send electronic messages via email from our computer to the entire company. Paperless? Not quite. How many of your coworkers do you see printing out every email they get on a nice brand, new sheet of 8.5 X 11 paper? If your office is anything like the ones in which I’ve worked, it’s a pretty high percentage. So let’s weigh the paper required to print out emails versus the paper memos that were used previously. At first glance, it would seem that since not everybody prints out their emails, it a net reduction. Not so fast.

Before the days of email, it took a serious amount of effort to write up, print out, copy and distribute a paper memo. The result was that memos were reserved for important communications. If you got more than two or three a week, you threw up your hands in exasperation at the wasted time. Today, thanks to the ease with which we can type and send email memos, our office inboxes see at least two or three memos every hour. Even if the percentage of these that gets printed is small, it still outweighs the paper used under the old system.

The more we try to go paperless, it seems, the more paper we use. I haven’t figured out how e-readers like the Kindle will increase our paper usage, but if history holds true, it will.

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One of the largest printers that is in common use in the United States today is called the engineering plotter. The name comes from the way the pen tip is guided as it creates its drawings. The pen itself moves back and forth along the Y axis while the entire Y axis assembly moves back and forth along the X axis of an imaginary two dimensional graph. Positioning a point on a graph with the use of X, Y coordinates is known as plotting the point. Similarly, the engineering plotter printer, plots each point where ink is required in order to make a drawing.

The engineering plotter was developed to make very large drawings of complex design drawings. The large physical size of the drawing enables the person reading the drawing to see important details easily in a work environment without additional magnification.

Engineering plotters, because of the large size of the drawings they create, use special oversized plotter papers. These drawings once completed are often so large that to transport them from place to place with the risk of damaging them, they are rolled up and inserted into rigid cardboard tubes. The same method is often used with architectural drawings and blue prints.

Information about where to draw lines is fed into the engineering plotter from a computer. The engineer or graphic artist who is making the drawing uses a Computer Aided Drawing (CAD) program to create the drawing directly on the computer. The computer screen lets the drawer zoom in and use other electronic enhancement features to create fine detail and rich surface textures that can give a realistic appearance to the drawn renderings.

In addition to engineering applications, plotters are often used for large drawings for other uses as well. Marketing graphics such as the artwork used on the outside of product cartons or even banners for display at trade shows or sales events may be created using a special kind of plotter printer.

Engineering plotters are generally large expensive machines used by companies rather than individuals. They are often kept in a separate printer room and shared through a network by all those with need to access it for large drawings. Manufacturing facilities that frequently make new products or prototypes are among the largest segment of engineering plotter users, often making drawing sets for the fabricators and production engineers to allow them to create the new product that has been designed. These types of drawings are often called working drawings and may be marked up with production notes and other handwritten edits as they are used for the initial production. These edits will be fed back to the engineer who will review them and make modifications to the original drawings as appropriate.

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