Researching printing 1:1 scale from SketchUp Pro

For anyone interested, I just published my tutorial on how to print at full scale from SketchUp, How to Print Full Scale 1:1 in SketchUp - MasterSketchUp.com

Of you can watch directly on YouTube Full Scale 1:1 Printing from SketchUp | Multi-page output - YouTube

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Good deal Matt.

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On Windows you can use Eneroth Viewport Resizer 2 to adjust the window ratio to fit the content. It’s way of finding the geometry extents is very slow though, so I’d recommend drawing a temporary face covering your content, and adjust the window to that.

https://extensions.sketchup.com/extension/7c63c4ed-1fda-48ba-bdc8-60663519a3f3/eneroth-viewport-resizer

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Oh man! I wish I had known that. I’ve known about your plugin, but I didn’t realize you had that feature that would resize the window to a selection. I thought you had to manually type in the dimensions you wanted. That’s really cool. I just downloaded and tried it. Worked great.

I’m going to add this to my article at least. And the YouTube description. Very useful tool.

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I thought about mentioning Christina’s extension yesterday but I figured you were looking for an operating system-agnostic approach. My apologies.

No problem Dave! Thanks for your help.

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Ugh, tiled drawings. After a few experiences in the '80s doing that, I swore off the technique. I’ve had a couple large format printers over time. A pen plotter in the early '90’s and an HP Design Jet after that. Full scale templates are cool too. They solved a 16 foot wide bow window in my own house that was a little too tight a fit at first.

In the, “Yeah, you can, but why?” department, I have to say, after my last plotter died, my motive to buy another one (like $3,000+) was sapped dry by the availability of local print shops. Print to scale a PDF and send it to a local print shop, and I think Xerographic (B&W) ouput is something like $.50 per square foot. Do you really want to spend time Scotch Taping a dozen pieces of paper together or just pay $6 for a 24"x36" printout from a shop down the street?

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I agree with you @RTCool. I would much rather have my local office supply shop print a PDF on one large sheet of paper. Setting it up in LayOut isn’t difficult and you can easily add additional details if needed. It’s more involved than the scope of Matt’s video video but this shows the model views with patterns at full size along with other details. I’ve turned off dimensions, labels and other stuff to show only the viewports but those things would be there on the printed sheet.

I think it’s useful to know how to print to full scale from SketchUp but I wouldn’t do it myself.

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FWIW, I am accustomed to printing to scale straight out of SketchUp all the time. I got used to it well before LayOut came along, but I mainly use it with the MacOS built in print-to-PDF feature. When I print a pdf to a scale, like 1/4" = 1’-0", then I go place it in a PowerCADD drawing of that scale, it just comes in correctly scaled, and all I have to do is position it. If you export a png or jpeg from SketchUp, you don’t get that advantage.

That said, I’m always picking some virtual paper size so the image ends up as one page only, not tiled as @Matt is looking to do here.

I said yesterday I’d have a look again on my main SU program.

What I’d forgotten completely is that the Mac version has NO checkbox for [ ] Use Model Extents in Document setup, in versions back at least to 2017.

And my Windows 10 on Parallels, where I also have versions of SU is misbehaving. All dialogue boxes are empty of text, and some have unexpected coloured backgrounds. Will try a Windows restart, check SU’s OpenGL settings and try SU 2017 and 2020 again.

I’ve been experiencing this as well, when I have certain printers set to default.

Got that largely but not completely sorted. I rarely use Windows, have converted to iMac over 4 years ago, and Windows 10 recently did lots of updates.

I also saw that I had had Windows scaling set to 400%, and that Parallels Toolbox wasn’t installed again after a recent update of Parallels.

So intalled the waiting Parallels Toolbox, and as instructed, set scaling to the default, and restarted Windows.

That took me to a series of prompts to complete my profile in a new version of Windows.

Then things worked normally, except that the second time I attempted to print, this time not to a real printer, but to Microsoft Output to PDF, all the SU print dialogue boxes were empty of text!

Not having a good evening here, on the computer front.

I know that SU on Windows doesn’t work well with displaying scale factor set higher than 150, but whatever I do to change it, Apply, then sign out to enable it to take effect, it won’t stick.

I’ve also tried lowering the size of the Windows screen, which is already 25% lower than the full Mac screen. That drops the (greyed out) display scaling from 400% to 350%, but not the 200%shown in Advanced settings, which I’ve reduced (twice now) to 150%, and Applied that twice in the Apply, Sign Out. Sign in again loop.

Sorry but I’m going to give up on this for tonight.

No worries John, I’ve pretty much accepted that there are some bugs when it comes to printing from SketchUp. Hopefully that gets resolved sometime.