Two types of printers used in industrial and commercial settings are the plotter and the wide format printer. The distinction between the two can be subtle.
Wide Format Printer
A wide format printer refers to any printer that can print documents of a size larger than the sizes of standard paper, such as poster or even billboard sized documents.
Plotter
By distinction, plotters are special printers that use a set of pens to draw large documents that consist entirely of lines with no areas of solid color. This is distinct from other printers, which draw all images as an array of colored dots. Plotters range in size from desktop to room-size. They are used most commonly in Computer Aided Drafting (CAD) and similar applications.
Modern Plotters
Pen-driven plotters have been replaced largely by other types of wide-format printers, though printersdesigned especially for use in CAD sometimes are still called "plotters."
