Printing to scale
-
@dlluce said:
I have gone through all the posts and followed the weird instructions exactly. I still cannot print a diagram larger than a single page to an exact scale. This is not a bug; it has broken the deal. Sketchup seems to be an enjoyable toy but without a simple, reliable, high-accuracy printing mechanism it is worthless. If they think I would buy Sketchup Pro after trying for three days to get a printout, Google must be out of their mind.
yeah, 3 days worth of trying to make a print would bum me out too.. (and i'm from a photo background so i've also dealt with color profiles which is way more of a headache than sizing.. stay away from that crap
...point being, i feel your pain)i dunno, the SU print dialog seems OK to me (especially if i try to think of a simpler way to do it.. i guess it's confusing at first but i think they could of made it a lot more confusing but not the other way around)..
really, there are only two factors involved.. scale and paper size..
if i draw a line in SU that's 100' long and i want to print it at a scale of 1" = 1' (1:12) then the resulting printed line will be 100inches long.. i'll need 100" worth of paper.. (or 9 sheets of A4 all lined up)maybe post the following info:
-size of your drawing
-desired scale
-desired paper size (or how many pieces of paper you'd like to span)and someone can help you with the settings..
-
@zootsuit said:
Hi
When I try to print to scale, i.e 1mm in sketchup = 1m on page, Sketchup positions the image in the corner of the page so it's spread accross 4 or more pages . My model is a simple 2d plan and the entire dimensions are 210 x297 i.e. A4.
Does anyone know how to centre the image on 1 page without losing the correct scale? If i try to type in the page dimensions (120,297) the print dialog box changes the scale as I type! Why is this happening?
Many Thanks
i'm so backtracking in this thread but whatever.. just in case you're still reading
i'm not 100% positive that PCs are the same as macs in this regard but i know the printers are... not all printers are set up to print borderless.. if you're trying to print something exactly the same size as the total dimensions of the paper, it won't happen unless your printer can handle it..
you see a piece of A4 as 210x297.. your printer sees only say 190x280 so that's why it's spreading it out over multiple sheets..
if your goal was to get the drawing on one sheet of paper without changing the scale, you did the only thing you could do which was to use a bigger sheet.. (well, you could of also tried to make a custom paper size with no border if your printer's driver doesn't include a preset option for A4 borderless but i personally can't tell you how to do that on a PC.).. you also would have had to use the zoom window to get the drawing to exactly fill the SU window.. (zoom window can get closer than zoom extents will give)
-
One note:
SU seems to have a bug when printing small objects. A 1m x 1m square will print happily on one a4 sheet to 1:10 scale, but a 10cm x 10cm, printed to 1:1, requires four to six sheets. It seems to go awry with everything smaller than about one foot across.
Anssi
-
@anssi said:
One note:
SU seems to have a bug when printing small objects. A 1m x 1m square will print happily on one a4 sheet to 1:10 scale, but a 10cm x 10cm, printed to 1:1, requires four to six sheets. It seems to go awry with everything smaller than about one foot across.
Anssi
hmm.. never noticed that.. do people actually draw things that small anyway?
[joking of course.. it's just that the smallest projects i typically do are measured at least in the thousands of sq.ft.]
-
I don't know, Anssi. Here is a 10cm x 10 cm square printed at 1:1 "virtually" in a PDF file (with PDFCreator).
I cannot really check as I don't have a physical printer but it looks like okay (on an A4 paper)
-
@gaieus said:
I don't know, Anssi. Here is a 10cm x 10 cm square printed at 1:1 "virtually" in a PDF file (with PDFCreator).
I cannot really check as I don't have a physical printer but it looks like okay (on an A4 paper)Gaieus, I might be going crazy...
What happens when you check "Use Model extents"?
When I zoom close, I get an OK result when the "Use model extents" is UNchecked, but if I check it, the required paper size jumps up to 354 x 354 mm! With a large model, the Model Extents checkbox works as it should, cutting away all extraneous white space. I made double sure that there is nothing else in my model than the little squareI also used Adobe PDF for my tests, as I don't want to print scores of white paper with a dumb square on them
Anssi -
What I do here is to Zoom extents in the model, set parallel projection and top view (of course) and here is what I have in the print dialog:
If I check "Use model extent", it will print it on 4 pages (10 cm x 10 cm rectangle) -
Gaieus,
So it is the same with you too. When I make a 1 m x 1 m square and print that to 1:10 scale with "Use model extents" selected, it works as expected - I get one page.
Anssi
-
I think I have read it several times what that setting is for but it must be some obscure thing as I can never remember. So I just do not check it.
-
Wanted to share in case someone else was experiencing this...
Environment:
SketchUp 7 (7.1.6859)
Mac OSX Snow LeopardProblem:
Despite following the directions explicitly... could not manage to print a true 1:1 scale.
Ex: I drew a 100mm x 20mm rectangle... Printed at 1:1 scale... Measured... longer side was at 104mm. Went through this over and over again. Read and re-read the directions...forum postings, everything...Nothing helped.Solution:
In the File->Page Setup (Remember this on a mac...may be different for PC) I HAD 'Format For' set to 'Canon MP620 Printer' and 'Paper Size' set to 'US Letter (borderless)'... Sounds reasonable right? Well guess not, because as a last ditch effort I decided set 'Format For' to 'Any Printer' and 'Paper Size' to a custom '8.5 x 11 Borderless' that I made via the 'Manage Custom Sizes' option in that same menu and BAM problem fixed!If I set 'Format For' back to 'Canon MP620 Printer' and the 'Paper Size' back to 'US Letter (borderless)' problem returns again! So, I'm not sure what the scoop is but obviously something screwy with the Canon supplied profile.
So moral of the story? It's definitely worth giving this fix a try if nothing else is working... definitely did it for me.
-Mike
Advertisement