Printing Sheets

[Roger Evans]

Well this may seem like a very basic elementary question but nonetheless ..

The question is Linked to my Pdf Question earlier .. I need to send larger format drawings out to a print company .. Question is what do I need to do to maintain Titleblock layout & all the info on the sheet ? In this case it is a simple line survey drawing

I have tried Pdf ~ but just have scale & cut off problems with titleblocks
So I then tried dwg ~ exporting a sheet ~ & importing it back in a new file to see result ~ the titleblock goes missing ~ & all previous black lines are yellow. I don't know how these will print & anyway I still need to preserve the titleblock.

Part of my problem in understanding all this is I have no experience with Autocad & the processes involved ~ The Print Company locally does not have access to Revit & has not yet set up Dwf ~ I suppose I could solve the problem in the short term by Loading Revit into their system but as more Large format prints are likely to be required in the future I need a longer term solution by just emailing sheets for printing.

Advice welcome

[LRaiz]

Revit PDF Writer has a bug dealing with margins on large size sheets. When I was involved we did not manage to make the supplier fix this bug even though we tried.

My suggestion - try another PDF printer driver. If you don't want to spend money on Acrobat then there are free products available. I recall seeing positive opinions about pdf995 (http://www.pdf995.com ). People with more experience will probably offer additional pointers.

[PaulB]

Roger,

The problems with PDFs seems to be that you need to make your borders slightly larger than if using your standard printer. I could print my A3 drawings to my A3 printer and they would come out at 100% scale and the whole sheet fitted on the print (as you would expect) but I could print the same drawing to a PDF file and then print that PDF file on my same printer and would need to set the scale to 97%.

So the solution was to make the title sheet a little smaller (the margins a little wider) and then it would fit using both methods. This applies to any size sheets.

Another little tip is to make the A1 size sheets a little smaller again so that when you print them on your A3 printer (as test prints, or office prints) they are exactly 50% of the original scale at A1.

It will take a little while in trying to get the max. coverage on your sheets but once you have it you won't need to go through it again, unless of course you change printers, as all printers seem to print slightly different margins.

Regards,


Paul

[ejburrell67787]

Well this may seem like a very basic elementary question but nonetheless ..

The question is Linked to my Pdf Question earlier .. I need to send larger format drawings out to a print company .. Question is what do I need to do to maintain Titleblock layout & all the info on the sheet ?
Hi Roger, have you tried downloading the printer driver for the actual printer your print company uses? Then all you need to do is print to a file from Revit, email them the file and then they can drag and drop the file to print it (or they may have a more sophisticated system to manage print files). I have done this successfully for an entire tender package.

best wishes... printing problems can be a right headache!

Elrond

[sbrown]

If your print shop will take a .plt file, go to OCE's website and download the windows printer drivers for the 9600. Install them, this will add that printer to your list of printers, then print to it and check the button that says plot to file. Make sure you select color, not black/white or greyscale. then send that file to your print shop for a test.

[Roger Evans]

Thanks eveyone some good suggestions here I'll check with print shop people tomorrow

[knurrebusk]

I just set up a custom "postscript page" in the Adobe pdf converter properties.
If I need to plot A0, I just type in 1188x900 mm.

Same with 2A0 format, in fact Revit is great at producing sheets to PDF.
The pens come out nice, and scale is spot on.