Printing from IntelliCAD/AutoCAD

From time to time, difficulties arise when printing (plotting) from IntelliCAD (and AutoCAD for that matter). Some of these plot issues are dealt with in the discussion which follows below. Please note that they have not been arranged in any order of importance. None of our suggestions can be taken as definitive - there are a myriad of printers/plotters in use, all with their own peculiarities and drafters all seem to construct their drawings in different ways.  I begin with a case study and follow with some more general comments.

Case study 1

The drafter who produced the drawing shown below was having difficulty making the complete drawing fit onto his A3 drawing sheet when plotting from IntelliCAD 2002 to a Canon A3 printer. The drawing could not be made to fit properly on the page and some part of the border sheet would always be missing. The problem must reside with IntelliCAD 2002 as the same drawing plotted correctly from IntelliCAD 98 and from AutoCAD.

My detective work

I loaded the problem drawing into IntelliCAD 2002 and noted that the drawing and sheet were constructed in meters. Since everything in the building trade in Australia is in mm, and as (AS1100 suggests that we construct our drawing sheets in mm, we immediately scaled the drawing by a factor of 1000.

Units were set to mm and the number of decimal points and angular system changed from the survey to a simple decimal system. DIMSCALE was then set to 200 since I expected that a site such as this would plot at 1:200 on an A3 sheet. Interestingly, on two successive occasions, IntelliCAD locked up when I went to change some other dimension settings. This lock up was repeatable, so I opened the drawing again and attempted to  WBLOCK the whole drawing out to a new file. This usually cleans up any phantom elements that may be in the drawing. (Thought - could this be the reason the plot fails?) IntelliCAD again locked up, but at a different step. Clearly, in my hands, this is a problem file (I will blame the surveyor!).

I then saved the drawing in AutoCAD Release 12 format. Like the WBLOCK feature, this also has the effect of cleaning up any unwanted entities (Surveyors often use 'add ons' to AutoCAD to create their files. References to these phantom entities often stay in the drawing, sometimes causing the type of problem we see here. Again I tried to adjust the dimension settings and again the drawing locked up. Clearly this was a seriously misbehaving drawing. I tried resetting the toolbars and menus to the IntelliCAD defaults, but this did not fix the problem. I then decided to start a brand new drawing and insert our 'problem' drawing into it. This worked, I had a drawing that I could use! Finally, as shown below, I was able to adjust the dimension settings and dimension along the side of the block. (under normal circumstances, we would simply label the boundary with its length.

I next noted that the complete drawing was in model space. It is possible that our plot problem may be overcome by plotting at 1:1 from paper space rather than from model space since paper space handling in IntelliCAD 2002 has been enhanced over earlier versions.

I  switched to paper space and inserted the title sheet into paper space. The width of the sheet block was 39 units, so it (the sheet) must have been drawn in cm as the unit (with the rest of the drawing [originally] in meters. I then scaled the sheet block by 10 in paper space. Now the sheet was in mm, and the drawing in mm. It is now much easier to work on plotting problems.

I used the mview command to display the design in paper space and set the scale to 1/100 giving a better result than 1/200 (below).

Putting the floating border on defpoints ensured that it would not plot.

I then imported my own A3 drawing sheet overlaying it on top of the problem drawing, making sure that both sheets were inserted at Cartesian coordinate 0,0. As can be seen from the figure below, the Design Cad sheet has a top right coordinate value of 390,277 and the problem sheet was a few mm larger in both the X and Y.

Australian drafting standard (AS1100) suggests 394, 283 as the drawing area. Clearly, neither sheet matches it. In my environment, my printer plots nearly A3 so 390, 277 is the best that I can do. I cannot get the problem sheet to plot on an HP A3 laser printer, although mine (in black) does.

I will now email the drawing to my client, together with these comments and await his reply with interest. The problem sheet may well now plot from paper space at a scale of 1:1 on his Canon printer. If it does not, the long term (and best) solution is for him to adjust the sheet size to match that specified by AS1100.

Plotting problem check list

Fitting the entire drawing sheet on the paper properly

It is often the case that when a drawing is sent to the printer/plotter, not all of it plots. Commonly, the top border line or the right border line does not print. This may occur even though the complete drawing shows in a print preview.

• The first thing to try is rather than the Extents option, to chose the Window option and pick (using an OSNAP to INTersection or END) the actual corners of your drawing sheet. Then send the drawing to the plotter. This Window option often works much better than the Extents option.

• Ensure that the 'Centred on sheet' option is ticked in the Advanced print option tab.

• If problems still persist, try creating a custom page size for your printer just larger than the standard paper size (A3, A2, A1 B1, b2 etc.) This may create a little more room.

• If you still have the problem, look at the actual size of your border sheet. For example, even though the Australian standard for technical drafting specifies a print area for (say) A3 sheets of 394mm by 283mm and a left margin of 20 mm, right margin 6 mm etc. , we cannot get this to fit properly on our US made Hewlett Packard A3 size printer. We slightly reduced the X and Y size as shown in the figure below in order to get the complete plot to show. Some experimentation is needed here, its the aspect ratio that's important. You may shift the horizontal line a different amount to the vertical line.