I often want to be able to print out a part of a drawing at the scale it would appear on a full page. For example, an A1 drawing might have a detail on it at, say, a scale of 1/10. I want to print that out, still at 1/10 but on an A4 sheet of paper. Effectively, this is an ability to print normally but by choosing a section of a drawing rather than the whole thing. I used to be able to do this with Windows based AutoCad but that was long ago. Is there any way of doing it using LO on a Mac without a long-winded process?
The most direct way I can think of to do this is to copy that portion of the drawing to a new LO project with the paper set to A4. It’s simple enough to copy and paste it and you can discard the A4 project after you’ve finished with it if you don’t need to keep it.
Yes I agree I have done a4 at the sort of scale you talk of. Doing scale straight from sketchup is tricky to say the least! I have an a4 LayOut template set up for this.
As usual, Dave, you have the answer! Worked a treat.
I have another question related to this issue.
I do not have a wide format printer but sometimes I need to produce A1 drawings. I would like to be able to create PDFs of A1 drawings but as my drivers are for printers that only go up to A3, that is not straightforward.
Does anyone know of an easy way to get A1 PDFs in this situation? I am on a Mac, so producing PDFs from a normal print dialog box is easy.
Hi Simon,
I’m glad that helped.
As for printing on larger paper, there’s likely an office supply store that has printing capabilities and could handle printing on larger paper. Do the setup in LayOut for the A1 paper and export the PDF. Send that to the office supply store and go pick it up when it is finished.
Dave - Sorry, I didn’t explain myself well enough. I didn’t mean a hard copy, I meant a PDF file.
In truth, I am not quite sure how the printing system works. It is easy enough to choose an A1 template for a drawing. If I have been working on that drawing for a while and go to print a PDF file, the dialog box indicates that I will only be printing a portion of the drawing - presumably because both my printers are A3, not A1. However, I find that if I save the drawing and reload it, I then DO have the option of printing the whole drawings, despite the printer limitation. So it seems that there is a workaround. What I was hoping for was a printer driver designed for a notional A1 printer/plotter so that I don’t have to save and reload. I did manage to download a suitable HP driver but I couldn’t see how to get it into the system without installing a printer I don’t have.
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Ha! No. I guess because I am so used to using the print dialog box on a Mac to create PDFs from any program, that is my default option. But your solution works. In fact, it even creates a slightly smaller file size. You’ve only gone and done it again, Dave! Thanks.
Did you also notice the options available for the export that you don’t get when you just print to PDF?
I did. useful!
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