Printing difficulties..............

tgm · 19 May 2011, 01:50

Why is SU the most difficult program I have ever used when trying to print a drawing?? It never fills a page right, dimension text is smaller than on screen when printed, etc. I have yet to have any luck printing a legal or letter size print where the model actually fits on the page. It's either real small, cutoff, or wants to print multiple pages.
I can't seem to scale anything to fit to the page as Fit to Page option has width and length tied together at some wierd ratio that doesn't fit a standard page.
I have been just capturing screen shots and printing that way as I still cannot figure out a good way to do it from SU.
Nothing seems to have changed in this area from v6, at least from my perspective.
What am I doing or not doing?? I just want to fill a page when printing and have everything legible.
I am assuming it's operator error unless someone tells me otherwise.

Need help from the SU gurus out there........

Thanks,

Tom in PA

honoluludesktop · 19 May 2011, 03:01

I believe that SketchUp exports images at the resolution of your monitor, say 72 or 96 dpi (dots per inch). You printer setting may be, say 300 dpi. So the print will be 96/300, or .32 times smaller then what you see on the screen. SketchUp was never designed to export or print scaled drawings. I think it is possible to match a exported image to a printer, but you have to calculate the print (not paper) size in dpi, then export the image at (in my case) 300/96=3.125 times the SketchUp window size. Say my SketchUp display is 1100x900 dpi (you can get this with the print functions), then I must export the image at 1100X3.125 by 900X3.125. SketchUp has some export limits I do not recall off hand.

If all you want to do is print from SketchUp a image as large as you can on your printer, set the printer properties to "scale to fit". This will typically be a low resolution image. To get around that, export a large image to a file, open the file with the default viewer, and print "scale to fit".

In any case, always print with a preview, that way you can see if the result is what you want.