NAILGUN Posted January 12, 2012 Posted January 12, 2012 Hi all! I recently took a 3 day AutoCAD course in London and found it invaluable. I have been meaning to get AutoCAD sorted for so long so as to improve my workflow. Was looking forward so much to putting my new knowledge to use for a site plan, but got round to it finally, and now that I have made the plan and done the layout properly, the result is a shoddy piece of rubbish, no where near suitable for client hands. Even the house floor and wall textures are gone. Has anyone got any idea why it would be like this? I had set the page to print at 170mm x 290mm. Here is the print in question. Many thanks! NAILGUN Quote
NAILGUN Posted January 12, 2012 Author Posted January 12, 2012 This is the original DWG. Having quite a few problems with it : ( Here it is. Quote
NAILGUN Posted January 12, 2012 Author Posted January 12, 2012 Here is the attached DWG and how I wanted it to look really! Quote
Jack_O'neill Posted January 12, 2012 Posted January 12, 2012 I'm sorry, I don't see the difference. Here is a screen shot of your dwg next to your pdf. Is it a display problem you are having or a print problem? Quote
NAILGUN Posted January 12, 2012 Author Posted January 12, 2012 If you look at the detail I put into the CAD drawing of the walls and dots on the floor for example, they just show up as grey in the print out. The detail is completely lacking. Quote
bill_borec Posted January 12, 2012 Posted January 12, 2012 Nailgun, Two things stand out to me...if I understand your concern/question properly: 1. You might try masking the text (TEXTMASK) or turning ON the 'background' of the text in the attributes for the text elements inside the building. This will result in cleaning up the text over the hatch. 2. The hatch appears to be too small of scale for your printout. If the dot hatch is too small, the dots will blend/melt together in the printout. Try a bigger scale and reprint. Hope this helps! Borec Quote
Jack_O'neill Posted January 12, 2012 Posted January 12, 2012 If you look at the detail I put into the CAD drawing of the walls and dots on the floor for example, they just show up as grey in the print out. The detail is completely lacking. Ah, ok...I see it now. You're talking about that tiny hatch pattern. I thought it was a solid gray fill. Your dots hatch on the floor is scaled at 0.0003. Way too small for the average printer to reproduce. It will look like a solid fill. You'll need to increase that. Here is the same hatch at .03: Quote
Jack_O'neill Posted January 12, 2012 Posted January 12, 2012 Is this more like what you wanted to see? and yes, the dimensions are missing. When I exploded the block, the dims blew up so I erased them. You do know you can draw this stuff full scale and then plot to whatever scale you need it reduced to, right? Wouild make things a lot easier on you. nailgun.pdf Quote
Jack_O'neill Posted January 12, 2012 Posted January 12, 2012 This is what it looks like on the Autocad screen now. Your linetype scales were set all to different values, which was why the letters didn't show up. I reset them all to .05 Quote
NAILGUN Posted January 12, 2012 Author Posted January 12, 2012 Thanks for the reply guys! Jack that looks a bit more like it! I'm a bit confused as well as why when I print it out some of the text looks a bit greyish when I set it to a black colour in AutoCAD? I am a bit confused on the scale thing, as I did it first by replicating a drawing sent to me with a certain part of it (the distance between OST and the river) to 5 metres. I used the SCALE command to make sure that it was this length, and then changed the units in the drawing to be in metres (that is typically what I would draw with the scale). I noticed that loads of the scaling was really difficult to use, like you said with the 0.0003 problem with hatching. Am I doing something wrong in this respect? Thanks so much for all your help! NAILGUN Quote
Jack_O'neill Posted January 12, 2012 Posted January 12, 2012 Your labels layer is set to color 250 which is really a very dark gray. Set it to white (color 7), and it will print as black. If you use a black background in Autocad, you'll see white lines. If you change to a white background, it will display as black. Color 7 is actually listed as white/black. The scaling issues, well, I'd just have to sit down with you and see what you were actually doing as you did it to see where you're going wrong. I very much urge you to find a book on Autocad or use the tutorials here on Cadtutor to solve those issues. The 3-day course you took was no doubt informative, but there's no way to cover all you really need to know in three days. Quote
NAILGUN Posted January 13, 2012 Author Posted January 13, 2012 Thanks for your reply Jack! I've done a bit of research and discovered the LTSCALE tool and it's contemporaries. However, for the moment I have to use the quick fix of doing LTSCALE = 30 to get the lines to show up in the paper area, which is a bit confusing as I thought that if you put CELTSCALE = 1 then the model and paper space scales should be the same. Baffled. I am also having problems now printing to JPEG and PNG. As you saw the lines looked blurry and compressed, but whenever I print in JPEG and PNG, the resolution of the model is beyond awful (must be coming out at about 200x100pxl). Any ideas? I really am struggling here. This is such a simple thing and yet AutoCAD can't seem to get it right. Quote
NAILGUN Posted January 13, 2012 Author Posted January 13, 2012 Ok having some REAL issues with the scaling now. Maybe somebody could help? I want to print out my plans as a JPEG so the only way to get them to be A4 size was to input the custom paper size of 4960 X 7016 pixels (A4 600dpi), so when I set the page size as this and I scaled up everything, I now have to have a linescale of 10,000 in order for them to be seen. My current scale is listed as 37351. What am I doing wrong here? Quote
sparkyuk Posted January 13, 2012 Posted January 13, 2012 Why jpeg ? autocad will not print as a jpeg as far as i know ? Can you not save it as a PDF from autocad and send it, then they can zoom in and out to see it. I have just downloaded Jack's pdf and saved that as a jpeg and it printed fine at A4 so whats up ? Quote
NAILGUN Posted January 13, 2012 Author Posted January 13, 2012 (edited) How can you save a PDF as a JPEG?! Also I have gone back to using a DWG to PDF but still cannot seem to fathom how to get the scaling correct. Whenever I choose it to do 1:1, it zooms in far too much, and 1:100 is also far too far away! The plans I construct need to fit onto the width of an A4 sheet so it is extremely difficult for me to get a scale done for each drawing, yet I need it to make sure everything is annotated properly? HELP! Edited January 13, 2012 by NAILGUN Additional Info Quote
Murph_map Posted January 13, 2012 Posted January 13, 2012 You may also want to look at the settings if you are plotting to PDF format with the dwg2pdf pc3. Increase the dpi settings, but be aware the higher the settings the larger the pdf file and the longer it will take to produce. Quote
NAILGUN Posted January 13, 2012 Author Posted January 13, 2012 Thanks Murph! That has helped a bit! Now if I can just get this whole scale and annotation business down... Quote
sparkyuk Posted January 13, 2012 Posted January 13, 2012 Nailgun are you saving the viewpoint or paper space, if its viewpoint double click inside the viewpoint and select the whole drawing then just set the scale you need and then setting the scale as per the attached drawing, as long as its to scale in pdf you can print to what ever paper size you like , it wont be to scale unless its printed on the correct paper size, so if you want to print at A4 at the right scale you need a A4 template loaded and then scale it at whatever scale you can to fit that paper viewpoint. If you still cant sort it post your finished drawing and I will send it to you in what ever format you want ok ? Quote
eldon Posted January 13, 2012 Posted January 13, 2012 An A4 at a scale of 1 to 50 in landscape alignment, comfortably encompasses the drawing. Quote
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