Hello Daily AutoCAD readers,

As I follow the forums and questions, most of you have difficulty in plotting. Even though there are several articles that were written about the subject, I can clearly see that you don’t read them carefully . In order for you to understand this article better I suggest you to read my previous article “Understanding scale concept and units in Autocad”.

As an example in this article, I will use an architectural application project that has been prepared by Abdullah Karacabay. Thanks to Abdullah Karacabay for this example. In Abdullah’s application project all of the plan, section, roof plan etc. is drawn in one drawing. I suggest that you should not use this method. Because, you create a very big drawing, and you can loose all of your drawings if something wrong happens to the file. Instead of this, you should open a specific folder for the project with the appropriate name and save the drawings under this folder with the name foundationplan.dwg, sectionaa.dwg etc. However, Abdullah’s drawing is absolutely correct as of scale. It was drawn by accepting 1 drawing unit as 1cm and 1/50 application project method. In Fig. 1, you can see the pile of plans and sections that is ordered like soldiers side by side.

Fig.1 All of the models are inside the same drawing (Dangerous!)

Of course, we prefer to draw all of the plans and sections in different drawings because of the above reason. Now, let’s start taking printouts.

STEP.1 Use layout

Do not draw a rectangle around the drawing and take print out by selecting its two corners any more; instead of this, use layouts. As you can see in Fig. 2, there are tabs at the lower left corner of the drawing area. These tabs show which area you are currently in. Let’s select Layout to use layouts.

Fig.2

STEP.2 Layout settings

When you click on Layout1, you will get an empty paper and a rectangle in the middle of it. I suggest you to delete that rectangle. By this way, you will get a pretty clean new paper. You will see a set-square in the lower left corner. This means that you are currently in paperspace mode. Now, determine which size of paper you are going to use and let’s move on to the layout settings. Right click on the Layout tab and open the “Page Setup Manager…” window (Fig. 3).

Fig.3 Select Page setup manager

You can see Page Setup Manager in Fig.4.

Fig.4 Page setup manager

In this window, you can see existing printout settings in “Selected page setup details” part, thus there is nothing here for now. In future, we will learn how to inherit layout settings from what we have drawn and printed previously. But first, let’s learn how to create a new one. Let’s press “Modify…” button while Layout1 is selected, then we get what is shown in Fig. 5.

Fig.5 Page setup window

In my example, I used “DWF6 ePlot.pc3” option as plotter, because this is the printer that I can virtually use the paper size that I want. You should select the device from which you would like to take print out. Next step is the paper size. I calculated the dimensions of the section that will be printed, and A0 size is needed, so I selected A0 size from the list. I am selecting plot scale as 1:1 (Fig. 6).

Fig.6

The reason why I selected the plotting scale as 1:1 is that I would like to take A0 printout from the layout that I adjusted already as A0. Don’t forget that “What to plot” option should be kept as “Layout” here. Select the scale as 1:1 and close the dialog box for now. Then you will get an empty paper with A0 size. Dotted rectangle drawn around the paper is the printing borders.

Now, do ZOOM Extends and see the paper in full and measure it from one corner to another by using distance (DIST) command. You will see that from top to bottom size of the paper is 1180×840mm. Our paper printing unit is always mm.

STEP.3 Let’s place our model onto the paper.

This is the most exciting part. Make a large cut in the middle of the paper. Believe me; the drawing is just under it . You can make this cut by using MVIEW command. I will do so; I will draw a frame by leaving 15mm on the edges.

Command: mview
….: 15,15
….: 1122,811

By doing this, I created a cut on the paper which leaves 15 mm spacing on the edges of paper and as you can see in Fig. 7, model has appeared inside this cut.

Fig.7 If you have used the MVIEW command properly, than you will see this

STEP.4 Let’s draw the titleblock.

Let’s insert the template title block that we have prepared previously by using 1unit = mm scale (Don’t worry if you didn’t prepare it according to scale, you can scale it) (Fig. 8).

Fig.8 Layout of title block

STEP.5 Let’s give scale.

Now, you must insert you model inside the paper so that the part that you will print should be placed inside the paper according to the scale that you want. First of all, you have to go to the model window. Double click on anywhere inside the model window. You will notice that UCS icon has changed. Zoom into the part that you would like to printout (Fig. 9).

Fig.9 Finally

Our section is nearly zoomed in the center of the paper. Now, it is time to make a calculation. I will explain you calculation method for this drawing in which 1 drawing unit is accepted as 1cm. During printing, we must determine how many units in the drawing does 1mm (thus the printing unit) correspond to. For example, normally 20 mm represents 1m in 1/50 plot. What represents 1m in this drawing? Answer is 100 units. By this way, we can say that:

20mm = 100unit, which is equal to 1/5

Now, let’s move on to command line and make a scaled zoom.

Command: _zoom
1/5xp

Now, your section is 1/50 scaled inside an A0 paper. Here XP means “times paper size”. Now, you can place the model in the middle of the paper by using pan, but you should avoid and moves that will change the zoom ratio. Then, double click on anywhere outside the model area and go to paperspace area. You can see the set-square once more on the lower left side.

STEP.6 Adjust the pen settings and take printout

Now, there is only one thing to do left. Go back to plot settings by using “modify” option from “Page setup manager” and make the “Plot Style Table” setting (Fig. 10).

Fig.10

For colored printing, select acad.ctb and for black and white printing, select monochrome.ctb, then select the settings for one last time, place the paper and take printout.
In this article, I tried to explain taking printouts easily from general aspects. You can find some other articles written about the topic of scale and plotting, by searching through the search part of our website by writing scale or plot.

Have a nice day.

Related Articles:

• Default scale settings for printouts
• Advanced plotting using Layouts
• Complex viewports inside layouts
• Plotting render and drawing together in layouts
• Plotting multiple layouts at the same time

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Autocad, Plotting, Printout