Printing - just slightly off scale

[mpenn.106508]

I'm an Architect and work from home for my one man company designing houses. I have sent home files to two different plotting places with the same results. Different machines mind you...I am only in my second month of using Revit and most of my plotting up to this point as been at home on my 11x17 printer (which is going great!) I don't know if I am sending the plot files incorrectly or what. They are able to print them, but the scale is off just slightly. For example, if a wall is suppose to measure 34'-0" it measures 33'-9 1/2". Strange. I am sending a sheet that is D size 22x34 wanting them to plot on 24x36. One plotter is HP DesignJet 750C (D/A1) Mono...100% scaling. The other one is OCE TDS600 Wrd. The OCE printer also has little small, almost hard to see dots. But in both cases the scale is off...

I had read through several threads on printing before I bought the software...it's such a frustrating issue. Does anyone have any ideas?

Also, if you are a small company Architect designing houses, do you have your own plotter in house? I'm thinking of it....
Thanks in advance....

[captainbunsaver]

I had the same problem, and found out that the culprit was a custom titleblock I had made that was not on the "origin" (I had moved the left side).
You have to make sure that EVERYTHING is correct, especially the scaling factor.

I use an HP100.

TC

[mpenn.106508]

The Title block sounds like it could be the answer...however, the first time I plotted it, I was still using the Revit deflaut title block. I'm not sure I would have even known enough then to open the family editor. I just checked my title block and it measures 22x34 just like it's suppose to. I measure the outside line on the Revit title block on the bottom of the sheet..it should be 2'-9" and my plot is 2'-8 31/32". Along the side, the Revit title block should be 1'-9" and it's 1'-8 12/16". So, I don't have an 'equal' scaling issue. The vertical is slightly worse.

Any other ideas?

[SkiSouth]

I've seen that the scale to fit was selected before, not the plot at 100 percent. It must be plot at 100 percent, or a PDF can mess it up.

[Andre Baros]

The most common reason that I've seen for that is when "scale to fit" is selected on the printing end. Because the original and the scaled version are only off by the width of the printer margin it sometimes doesn't even get caught.

[Henry D]

Recently I printed out a whole set of PDF's and I forgot to select Zoom 100% size and left it at "Fit to Page". Emailed the files to the printer and when I got them back noticed they were all out of scale...ouch!! $220 mistake!

[tc3dcad60731]

Consider the printer (machine) first and take note that from a personal perspective I feel that HP is the BEST! They do have some things that you need to figure out and configure specifically for their printers. Now, consider the printer (company) and do they know the machine that they are using. We have a well known and large franchise printing firm here that will not print Revit files. We have to convert to PDF for them to print. So we went with a smaller printing firm that would allow us to print them out. The printing machine is an HP500 42n and the way they had it set-up was to print on the 24" roll size. Our title block is 22x34 and we would rotate the print so that it would print on the 24" roll. Each time that we did this it would print in the upper right corner with no margin and would also cut off the end of the drawing. The resolution to this problem was that we had to print on the 36" side and it will print centered and to scale each time! It is all a matter of knowing the machine. Further, if we converted the file to pdf and printed on this machine it would show up in the preview just fine but would print offset. I am still trying to figure out the pdf situation.

As for the dots on the OCE', that has me baffled! It could just be an anomaly. By that I mean that with the same HP500 printer, if we printed a dwf of the rvt file it would print lines through the iso views. However, on a hp5000 laser printer at 11x17 these lines did not show up nor did they show up when scaled to 8.5x11 on a psc2110 for a quick check.

We also are a small firm here working from a home office and are fixing to buy our own large format printer!

[Wes Macaulay]

As I understand it, OCE prints everything rasterized whereas HP prints as vectors. And man, do the results vary! And then there's KIP and Xerox... bottom line is it takes some fussing to get things rolling.

[SkiSouth]

. The OCE printer also has little small, almost hard to see dots. I ....Revit is capable of declariing a line width that the OCE (and other rasterizing machines) cannot duplicate correctly. If the line thickness is smaller than the resolution of the printer, the OCE prints the line correctly, but omits "dots" where the line does not cross. I believe that the lower limit on the OCE 9600 series (what my print shop uses) is in the .005 range. Usually I try to hold my smallest pen weight to .01. If the print shop uses a plot that has the .01 as the lower range, and I ask for a half scale using the plot file, anything using the .01 pen goes grey scale (hard to see dots), so about .008 is probably the legibility limit on oce. By legiblity I mean a continuous black line. The OCE will plot the line you have defined correctly, but how solid the line appears will depend on what width line you have defined in Revit.

Don't let a print shop tell you that an OCE can't plot a Revit file correctly. That only bespeaks of their lack of knowledge about plotting.

[gbrowne]

Possibly off topic, but:

When I started in this game, using actual hold in your hand pens, anything thinner than a .25mm was banned, as they didn't show up on photocopies terribly well and,

I know plans should be to scale and all, but plans should never be scaled from! Thats what dims are for. Anything other than dimensioned sizes are guesswork.

[SkiSouth]

When I started in this game, using actual hold in your hand pens, anything thinner than a .25mm was banned, .
Yeah. I still have ink under my nails from cleaning those pens. Ever bent one of the wires?

[gbrowne]

Did I ever! Bain of my life. I looked after my pens cos they were my tools of the trade, but the boss's daughter used to leave the lids off, or leave them on the sloped drawing table...

Aghhh!! Thing is, years have passed, changed companies couple times, but she is now working with me again using Revit! A happy ending..