How to Printing an AutoCAD Drawing

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Printing an AutoCAD Drawing

Overview

  • Setting up a drawing to be printed

  • Using the Plot dialog box

  • Assigning lineweights to layers in your drawing

  • Selecting the part of your drawing to print

  • Previewing a print

  • Printing a layout

  • Looking at plot styles

First of all, with today’s equipment, there is no difference between printing and plotting. Printing used to refer to smaller-format printers, and plotting used to refer to pen plotters, most of which were for plotting large sheets. But the terms are now used almost interchangeably. Pen plotters have a few extra settings that other printing devices do not have. Otherwise, as far as AutoCAD is concerned, the differences between plotters and laserjet, inkjet, dot-matrix, and electrostatic printers are minimal. So in this book, printing and plotting mean the same thing.

Getting your drawing onto paper can be very easy or very hard, depending on whether your computer is connected to a printer that has been set up to print AutoCAD drawings and depending on whether AutoCAD has been configured to work with your printer. If these initial conditions are met, you can handily manage printing with the tools you will learn in this chapter. If you do not have the initial setup, you will need to get some help either to set up your system to make AutoCAD work properly with your printer or to find out how your system is already set up to print AutoCAD drawings.

We will be using a couple of standard setup configurations between AutoCAD and printers to move through the exercises. You may or may not be able to follow each step to completion, depending on whether you have access to an 8.5" x 11" laserjet or inkjet printer, a larger-format printer, or both.

We have four drawings to print:

Cabin11a A drawing with Model Space only, to be printed on an 81⁄2" x 11" sheet at 1⁄8" scale

Cabin13a The same drawing as Cabin11a, except with the title block and border on Layout1, to be printed from Layout1 on an 81⁄2" x 11" sheet at a scale of 1:1

Cabin13b The 11" x 17" drawing, to be printed on an 11" x 17" sheet from a layout

Site13 To be printed on a 30" x 42" sheet from a layout

Even if your printer won’t let you print in all these formats, I suggest that you follow along with the text. You’ll at least get to preview how your drawing would look if printed in these formats, and you will be taking large strides toward learning how to set up and run a print for your drawing. The purpose of this chapter is to give you the basic principles for printing whether or not you have access to a printer.

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