How to print a portrait A3 landscape page from Layout on two A4 pages?

[john_mcclenahan]

During the lockdown in UK I’m trying to learn Layout.

Getting the hang of it, thanks to tutorials on learn.sketchup.com, but I’m stuck at one aspect - printing.

I have set up a series of A3 landscape page in Layout, properly scaled for a plan view of a theatre set design, and unscaled for a couple of perspective views.

I can’t figure out how to print the A3 landscape page onto two portrait A4 pages (the biggest my printer will print).

And internet search suggests it should be possible using Adobe Reader, but following the instructions doesn’t work, and I can’t see where I’ve gone wrong.

I need to preserve the scale at 100%.FKOS set.layout (4.2 MB)

Is it possible easily within Layout?

Or can anyone help me see where I went wrong in Adobe Reader? I asked it to Tile at 100%, but only a single page is printed. Or if I set the Printer to A4 Portrait in the System dialog,

and whether I set the Adobe Reader printer settings page to orientation to Portrait or Landscape, it will only show printing over four pages, all landscape.

Or suggest an alternative?

In the past, @DaveR helped me do it by setting up two separate A4 portrait pages in Layout then positioning the model differently in each page, with a small overlap and registration marks in the two pages.

Print to 1:24 scale in Layout on two A4 portrait pages

I’ve ‘Sent to Layout’ a Sketchup model viewed in parallel projection which will comfortably fit on an A3 landscape page. I have only an A4 printer. I can’t seem to figure out how to set up Layout to print the scene over two portrait A4 pages. If I set the paper size in Layout to use the A3 landscape template, open the SU file, check Preserve scale on resizing, resize the Layout window so the model is all visible, then print to my A4 printer, it only prints the left hand half of the page. If …

But I’m hoping it can be done from the A3 landscape page itself.

If it isn’t possible at all, I’ll have to revert to the former method, and redo the Layout pages.

[DaveR]

Due to printer options available to me I can’t set up Reader to print on A4 paper but I suspect that your A3 document’s borders are too wide to fit onto two sheets of A4 in the portrait arrangement. You could test that by scaling down the printout a bit to see at what point it switches to using only two sheets.

If it was my project I wouldn’t screw around with it. I’d just set it up like you referred to so I can see exactly what I’m going to print on each sheet from the beginning.

[john_mcclenahan]

I think I’ll have to go back to your original suggestion, of setting things up just with A4 pages in Landscape. But I’ll try your first idea. Maybe reducing the overlap to zero might help, but then there might be a gap in the model plan.

[DaveR]

@john_mcclenahan

Maybe reducing the overlap to zero might help, but then there might be a gap in the model plan.

Possibly. Especially if the printer can bleed the print off the edge of the paper.

[john_mcclenahan]

Just tried setting the overlap to 0, and the Tile scaling to 95%. Print preview still shows four tiled landscape pages.

And I don’t think my printer will print to the edges - I see no option for it anywhere in its print dialogues.

I’ll try setting the paper size to US Letter or Legal, to see if that makes a difference.

But unless that works, I think I’ll have to revert to your much earlier solution, of setting up Layout just with A4 pages. Thanks for trying with this, though.

[LATER] Nope, faking the paper size to US Legal or Letter doesn’t work either. US Legal allows it to show portrait tiles, but three of them, centred vertically so it would print ‘off’ on A4, and US Letter still shows the four page tiling Landscape, similar to A4.

[McGordon]

@john_mcclenahan

And I don’t think my printer will print to the edges - I see no option for it anywhere in its print dialogues.

I don’t have the same printer as you, but if its the Canon MG570 the specs say it can print borderless A4.

Go to File Menu → Page Setup
Click on the Paper Size popup menu and click on A4 and see if it has a submenu to choose A4 Borderless like this:

Edit: If you’re doing this from Acrobat Reader, they’ve hidden it in a non-standard way. You’d have to do File menu → Print then click “Page Setup” button to see the dialog.

[john_mcclenahan]

Thank you. That might work, and I’ll try it.

I’ve also found another off the wall solution called Briss - a Java cross platform application from SourceForge, that will crop PDF pages fairly quickly and easily. It requires you to allow running a program that isn’t from an Authorised Developer. On Mac, find the program (I copied it’s downloaded folder to Applications), then Ctrl+click, then allow it to open.

I’m just trying the latter, and will report back after eating and a couple of other tasks I have to do soon.

[john_mcclenahan]

Thank for showing me where to find the Borderless printing option - I didn’t know my Canon printer could do that. But it doesn’t help in this case - the A3 page still spreads over four landscape A4 pages.

The Bliss solution works, if you are careful, and does let you separate left and right parts of the A3 page, and save them as separate pages using the Action tab. That might be a useful tool for Windows users, who don’t have a native app for viewing PDFs, afaik.

And I found that using the native Preview app on Mac also works, again if you are careful, and remember to reset the scale EVERY TIME to 100% when printing. It doesn’t remember it from one opening to the next. You can drag a rectangle to cover the left-to-middle half of the A3 page, then Crop, and Export the left half of the page to a new PDF, then rinse and repeat for the right half.

But I think after all these experiments that @DaveR’s solution is the least bad - to set up two pages in Layout, for each view of the model, separated into left and right halves.

It’s a pity there seems to be no simple way to get the page to Tile into two, not four, A4 pages. If there is a way, I’ve not found it yet.