Right.
So now we've looked at the difference between model space and paper space.
We can look at actually printing now and just sending it to a printer.
You might have noticed in our paper space layouts we get this white area here.
Okay.
And that is it's there to represent the size of our sheet and how our model will look, how our drawing
sorry, will look on the paper that is specified.
Okay.
So bear with me if that sounded like a bit of a long winded statement, but you'll see what I mean if
I was to press print.
Now this is what we would print on a piece of paper.
This stuff out here in the gray area wouldn't be included because think of it like a print preview this
background.
Okay?
And the way we change that is in the print setting itself.
So if I go up here to print.
Okay.
As with anything in AutoCAD, we're confronted with lots of options, but it's fairly self-explanatory
and we'll go through them.
So page setup.
You can you can you can save page setups and things.
That's a bit advanced for this.
Just ignore that layout for the moment.
Here we want to choose our printer.
So.
Yours is going to be different to mine depending what prince you've got or whether you've even got a
printer.
You can set this just so we're all using the same thing.
Let's set it to one of the PDF ones.
So yours might not say Adobe PDF depending what you've got installed on your machine, but you should
have AutoCAD pdf.
Okay maybe.
Or something pdf.
So just change it to one of the PDF settings and what that's going to do is going to output it as a
PDF file.
So in AutoCAD, the way you or one of the ways the traditional way you output to a pdf file is by printing
to PDF.
Okay.
So that's what this will do.
And under properties next to it, you've got your general properties.
So that's that's self-explanatory.
You do have options, which are things like the quality.
Okay.
And there is going to be a chapter on working with PDFs.
So this is just a print chapter.
We're not going to go too much into detail about that.
You have your paper size now.
If you're printing 1 to 1, then you want your paper size to be the same as your frame size, your title
block size.
And we used an A4.
You can see, um, one of these is landscape and one of them is portrait, that's landscape, which
we're getting our preview.
Okay, now what do we want to plot?
Well, I can choose to plot the extents, but the extents is going to include all of this.
Okay.
I just want to print this one frame here.
So what I can choose is to print the window.
I can click on the window box and I'm just going to draw a window.
I'm just going to draw it a bit outside my frame to make sure it includes the lines themselves.
Okay.
And that will now print the window.
I want it to center the plot in the screen.
I don't want it to be like in the top left corner or anything like that.
Um, and now we get to scale.
Remember, everything is 1 to 1.
So I want to print 1 to 1.
Now, we could say fit to paper, but I want it 1 to 1.
Okay.
If you were just printing something, maybe it was a quick image, a quick part of the drawing, just
to show someone what you're up to.
You might say, Just print me a window and fit it to the paper.
But in this case, we want it 1 to 1, which means one millimetre equals one unit.
Okay, forget about these options.
I would say if you've got transparency, we've looked at transparency and the properties, you need
to tell your printer to print that.
So if you've got transparency and you're drawing, you want it and it doesn't show.
Maybe you set some things as transparent, but when you print them, they're not transparent.
You've probably haven't selected this.
We've looked at line weights.
You can or you cannot print the whole range of line weights.
If you if you don't select that, all lines will come out as normal size, normal width lines.
Okay.
So depending whether you've used line weights, you would select that and other options.
I'd just leave them.
Plot styles leave that.
If you work in a company, they might have their own plot styles.
A plot style will say things like, Anything that's red will come out thick.
Anything that's green will come out transparent, anything that's yellow and blah, blah, blah.
That will be something set by a company under their standards, by the CAD manager if they use it.
If they don't, if you're just at home and you're working along with this, just ignore it for now and
then you can choose portrait or landscape.
So this is obviously landscape.
Okay, So if I do a preview of that.
It's going to show me.
That's how it will print on a piece of paper.
Now.
If I exit the preview, if I press.
Okay, this is going to come out on my on a printer or in this case, it's going to ask me where to
save the PDF.
That.
Um, the action of of pressing.
Okay.
And printing what that does that saves all these settings.
So next time it will come up with the same setting.
Okay.
So if I was to okay that I get this box and it will say where do you want to save your pdf?
If I then save it, all these options will kind of lock in to default on this drawing.
Sometimes you want to lock those in so that it's easier next time, but you don't actually want it to
come out on a piece of paper or you don't want it to save as PDF.
In that case, you can click apply to layout.
Okay.
And then when you cancel it, it saves those options for you.
In this case, we didn't change anything.
If I if I go.
So now what I'll do to save me setting all those again, I can say just previous plot.
So that will say same options as the previous plot or the last plot you did, but this time for our
window I want to use.
This.
Sheets here.
Okay.
If I now go apply to layout.
And let AutoCAD do its thing.
I'll cancel that.
You'll see that white space has moved.
On here because it's locked in our last print settings.
So this is now our kind of print preview that it's showing this on a piece of paper.
The reason I want to show you that is sometimes what can happen if you start a new drawing.
And I'm going to do that.
I'm going to go to this.
This is a new drawing.
Let's pretend we've got a model in here.
We go to paper space.
Okay, I'm going to open up.
Okay.
I'm going to go to our title block.
I'm going to get a big title Block the largest title block we've got.
I'm going to copy that.
I'm going to bring it in.
I'm going to paste it.
I'm going to post it there.
Okay.
And this is what can happen.
People look at this and say, something's gone wrong.
My paper, my size, my white background is only very small compared to the sheet.
Okay.
Sometimes the opposite can happen.
You can have a big white area and a tiny little drawing frame, and people think something's gone wrong.
Something's not working.
Don't worry.
That is perfectly normal behaviour for your the first time you print because you haven't printed yet.
You haven't saved those print settings.
So all you need to do is go to print.
Okay, change it.
So I'll change that as a PDF.
It's this one is a large AoE sheet.
Okay.
Um, it's 1 to 1 as landscape.
And what do you want to plot?
Let's plot the window.
Yeah.
Okay.
And if I preview that, you'll say I didn't quite draw it around.
Let me do that again.
Okay.
I think what's happening here, if I go if I just do it scale to fit, it's just slightly too big for
the pdf, the paper in the PDF setting.
Don't worry about that.
So if I do fit, you can see it's one point.
It's basically 1 to 1 anyway.
If I then preview that now that fits on the sheet.
If I then either print it by selecting okay, I'll just go apply to layout.
Okay.
And then cancel it.
Now our white space fits perfectly on the paper.
So if you open a drawing and you start working or you're doing this course and you go to print and it
doesn't, you bring in your title block and it doesn't fit on the white print preview, That's perfectly
normal.
It's just because you haven't yet set up your printer settings.
And once you set up your printer settings, that's saved now and that will always look okay.
So.
Going back to this, if I now wanted to print that, it's a simple case of just saying, okay.
And it's saving a PDF.
If I wanted to print it to my printer.
Okay.
I could just select my printer, which I think is that one.
And if I click okay, that will come out my printer now.
So simple.
So the main thing is using the same scale, getting these print settings correct.
Hopefully they all made sense to you.
Ignore most of this.
Ignore that, ignore that.
Ignore that.
Unless the only reason, the only time I use this really is if I go previous plot.
I want to do the previous settings.
Um, select your printer, select your paper size.
What do you want to print?
Maybe you want it to print everything in your drawing, in which case you could go extents.
But that is going to print everything.
Okay.
Um, yeah.
Center it generally you want it on a window.
You want to select an object.
Like that.
Center it.
And that's what you want to print.
So that's print.
Okay.
Again, if if you didn't quite get that or if you didn't get it at all, please rewatch if you were
8,090%.
Just carry on with the course when you put it into practice.
In the example that you're doing, depending on what course you're doing, you'll see this in more detail
and it will actually be specific to something you've created.
Okay.
So that's print.