I have, and can use, a blueline machine with the many mylar/vellum prints my predecessor produced over the years.
My question is about how to print copies from a reduced negative. Surely there is/was a special machine/process for this. I've seen a few of these negatives, and they're similar to those for photographs, but I don't know how they were produced or developed.
The print shop I worked at in college had a camera about the size of a compact car that would take a picture of an original the size of a king size bed.
Looked like a very large Kodak Land Camera with the bellows that was on a large frame and pointed down at a king sized bed platform that would hold the drawing.
I use my Brother MFC J6710DW
Place the negatives on the glass and place a bright white paper over that and close the cover.
Scan negative to a 600dpi or 1200dpi .tiff and use an image editor to invert the colors of the image for a white background and black image and save again as a .jpeg, .tiff and/or .pdf
Print to a PDF of appropriate size and quality
I also kept negatives. Dunno where they are.
Better was to have an extra positive made and keep that.
Positives were my favorite form for recording, they last practically forever.
I've got one of most every subdivision I've done plus a few boundaries that clients wanted recorded.
There may be a print shop or photographer that can make a positive for you.
It has been over 20yrs since I went that route and don't even know of a print shop that will do them.
Used Ridgeways in Shreveport and Longview.
Acme Map in Tyler may be the only one left around here.
jwdenney, post: 323853, member: 7689 wrote: I have, and can use, a blueline machine with the many mylar/vellum prints my predecessor produced over the years.
My question is about how to print copies from a reduced negative. Surely there is/was a special machine/process for this. I've seen a few of these negatives, and they're similar to those for photographs, but I don't know how they were produced or developed.
Are you talking about aperture cards? They have scanners for those that you can buy or rent. If you've got a bunch, maybe a rental and a few days worth of scanning to convert your data to digital.
Your local blueprint shop can probably make "conract positives" on mylar or photo paper for you directly fron those negatives.
Many areas require that subdivision plats to be filed must be of "archival quality". The ONLY way to get that is through the photo process. No modern plotter can do that because none of the new inks arte "archival"
You can plot on mylar with the new plotters, but what happens if you dump a glass of water on the plot? That does not hurt a photocopy, but it plays hell with the new inks.