Fitting Drawing to Page

[Allison]

This might seem like a silly question, but at college we page-set-up to A3 at scale 1:50. I am attempting to draw the same drawing on my home PC, but my printer only prints A4.

So I set up my home drawing also with a scale of 1:50 and A4 landscape. I am trying to draw a wall to a length 14900 but its so long it's going off the drawing page. I feel its a scaling issue but can't figure it out.

I put in my memory stick with the same drawing from college, to check that the page set up on that drawing was for A3, but as soon as I put it on my PC, its automatically set up for my printer, at A4, so I can't tell.

What am I missing here - I am sure it must be something simple?

All help appreciated

[IanH]

A wall of 14900mm is too long to fit on an A4 page at 1:50 so what it is doing is correct.

If you want it to fit on A4, you need to change the scale to 1:100 so it will fit but the printing area will differ between A4 and A3.

If all you want to do is perform test prints on your A4 printer and not worry about scaling from the plan but want to keep to same area as would be available on A3 (but at a smaller scale), then you can change the printer scaling in printer setup to 71% which will scale A3 to A4 at a non standard scale. This will allow you to continue to work on screen at 1:50 in an A3 paper space but print on A4 at a reduced scale. When you go back to college and print on A3 printer, you will need to ensure that the printer scaling is back at 100%.

[cbaarch]

what version of vw?

are you using sheet layers?

[Allison]

I will give that a try, thanks very much for such good advice

[Pat Stanford]

It sounds like you have your page size set to "One Page". This means that the default page will be one sheet of the standard paper size on the current printer.

You might be better off clicking the Use Paper Size Unavailable in Printer Setup. This will allow you to specify the drawing area to a specific paper size. Very useful if you want to do a A0 drawing and don't have an A0 printer available. If you have the Show Page Breaks check box clicked in the Page Setup, then you will see how the pages will tile if printed full size on the current printer.

If you have the Show Page Breaks unchecked, then all you will see is the paper boundary.

Depending on your printer setup, you can possibly enter a scale in the print driver to shrink it down to print on a single page, or you can go to the Printer Setup (Mac) and in the Settings: pulldown select VectorWorks and enter a scale there.

Be careful. I have had clients set scales in both places, plus use the wrong layer scale and end up with something much smaller than they expected and not be able to figure out why.

Pat