Printing part of a drawing

Normally I draw the model in SU and print out from LO.

But there are times when you might want to print part of your drawing to a correct scale but not the whole thing. Say the drawing is A1 size and 1/100 scale. You want to see what part of it will look like on paper but you can only print at A4. A4 paper is big enough to print the part you want at 1/100.

Can this be done quickly and simply (without creating new LO sheets, say), preferably from within LO?

Don’t know, but maybe you get more reactions if you move it to the layout section…

Don’t quite understand what you mean.

I guess what I’m after is a screen print, or bounded selection, at defined scale. I have just tried printing an A1 drawing on A4 and I get the bottom left corner of the drawing. Fine if that is where your detail happens to be, but not otherwise.

I think you could do what you are talking about in SketchUp with a bunch of faffing about. Since you have LAyOut, though, I don’t see why you wouldn’t use it. Send the file to LO using an A4 template, set the scale to 1:100 and adjust the position on the page.

Ah, but that wouldn’t get you all the notes and dimensions you carefully added in LO.

The point is to see exactly what the full drawing would show but only in part.

Here’s an example. This is an A1 drawing in full (apart from the title box):


And this is the part I want to print on A4:

No idea if it would do what you need but a quick Google brings up PDF-Xchange’s snapshot printing ability…

Thanks for the suggestion Paul. Even if it were Mac compatible, I suspect snapshot printing would be like a screen print. I do that all the time (as above) and very useful it is…providing it doesn’t need to be to a recognizable scale.

PDF editor software (like the PDF XChange Editor or Adobe Acrobat) can crop a PDF page. I find having one a must, for this feature, the ability to add or remove pages and for the optimization function.

Since this is a question about LayOut, I moved your thread to the LayOut category as @tweenulzeven suggested two hours ago.

You could still do this with nothing but LayOut. Copy the contents of the sheet to a new file with the paper set to A4. Move the contents around so what you want to see is on the page.

Example:

Original on Arch E paper.
Screenshot - 2_1_2022 , 7_36_40 AM

Copied to Letter size paper and moved to the area I want to print. I grouped everything after pasting to make it easier to move around.

Exported PDF.

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Like this, you mean?


That works. It’s a little more of a faff than ideal but it is a pretty fast workaround. Cheers (as usual)!

Certainly faster than exporting to PDF and then doing it from a PDF editor (which also creates a temporary file).