We saw on the previous page that PlansPlus gives a lot of control to the user over printing scope and scale. In this section we will investigate how to use these abilities, and another new one, to facilitate printing large format plans - those that an architect or contractor uses on site. They are done large so that detail can be easily seen on the plans, but not so large as to be unwieldy.
There are many standards for paper sizes, not surprisingly those that are English measurement derived and those that are based on metric. There are a vast number of other traditional sizes that need not further concern us here; see, for example, the Wikipedia article on "paper size".
In order to print large format you obviously need to have a large format printer, unless you use cut and paste as Punch!'s Print-to-Scale method contemplates. Punch! and PlansPlus query the printer drivers selected by the user to see what size of paper is available; that forms the basis of both the Print-to-Page and Print-to-Scale print functions. Punch! and PlansPlus always can take advantage of the largest page size available, if the user indicates it is available in the Printer dialog, Properties button. The user uses that dialog to select Landscape or Portrait mode, and page sizes and margins, and the printer driver determines from these the maximum printable page dimensions and passes them along to Punch! and PlansPlus, which use them to determine what exactly a page is. If you have a large format printer, Punch! and PlansPlus then will automatically take advantage of it and print all the way to the edges.
But large format printers are still costly, mainly because they are so seldom used as compared to page printers, that mass production savings aren't fully realized for them. Fortunately, print shops, such as the Fedex-Kinkos chain and many others maintain large format printers for their customer's use. The problem is that because the printer is not connected to the Punch! machine, Punch! and PlansPlus cannot query the drivers for the information needed to make use of them.
This problem has been solved by Adobe, the printing software firm that created the Acrobat Reader. The key part of the Acrobat system is a software document format called PDF which combines aspects of text, raster and vector graphics to allow a page to be created virtually in the Acrobat Writer and them reproduced in both video and on paper very faithful to the original. All we need to do is convert our Punch! plans to a PDF document, and it can be reproduced almost anywhere using the Acrobat Reader or similar software.
The PDF conversion paradigm is innovative as well. Rather than create a huge series of conversion routines to convert Word, Excel, PowerPoint, WordPerfect, Punch! and thousands of other formats into PDF, they instead created a virtual printer driver. The driver looks like a printer to Windows, and therefore also to all Windows applications. Windows sends a universal sort of code to printers called PostScript (also developed, as it happens, by Adobe). The PDF virtual printer translates the PostScript into PDF, and the Acrobat Reader is capable of converting that back into PostScript in order to print the PDF file. It is a very slick way of handling the document transport problem.
OK, so how do we pull all this off? First you must purchase Adobe's Acrobat Writer or an equivalent to get the conversion driver. Fortunately, there are lots of venders of such software besides Adobe now, including a slough of freeware converters. These can do a good or not so good job of conversion, mainly sometimes ignoring the more advanced graphical content. Once the driver is installed, it has to be used to determine if it will work with the job at hand.
Another problem is file size. Images on the screen, as memory hungry as they are (see The Ten Commandments of Texture and Color for an example) are beggared by the demands of printing. Printers have between 3 and 12 time better resolution on a page than video screens do for a given length, 9 to 144 better resolution in area, but that requires 12 to 144 times more memory to store and display. This problem is usually eased by composing horizontal stripes of a page and sending them to the printer one at a time. This obviously can't be done for PDF files, though; they have to be fully composed on the disk taken to the printer. Fortunately, advanced compression techniques are used, and PDF files are surprisingly compact for the amount of potential data they carry. Image sizes that amount to hundreds or thousands of megabytes of data can usually be handled on a CD-ROM without problems.
When the standard printer dialog is displayed by a Windows application, it allows for the selection of a printer from the set of printer drivers found available, the number of copies and whether the results are to be collated, the set of selections for page range, a checkbox for "Print to File", and a Properties button (or, in newer software, property tabs - in this picture, no such tabs are available). These tabs, and the dialogs supporting the Properties button are supplied by the printer's driver, not Windows, so they change with different printers. All give you the ability to set landscape/portrait mode, select the printer paper size (where there is the possibility of different sizes), and usually set page margins. There may be many other options, but these are the ones we are interested in.
Likewise, the PDF virtual printer should also have those options; note that the print dialog above shows several such PDF drivers. In fact, rather than being limited to the page size options that a physical printer can handle, the PDF printer should be able to handle all sorts of page dimensions: essentially everything from business cards and address labels to ISO A sheets, or even larger. It is, of course, necessary to find a real printer with those dimensions if the plan is ever to be realized on paper.
When printing large format, it is nearly always a requirement that the printing be done to some particular scale, or set of scales. This is what inspectors, engineers and construction people are used to, and so it is required. Large printing is therefore almost always Print-to-Scale, never Print-to-a-Page. Since that is the case, there is no guarantee ever that a plan will fit on a page of a given size, at a given scale, and if it doesn't, Punch! or PlansPlus will go to multiple pages. Fitting everything in a drawing onto the page in such a way that it will print on one page is often a case of cut-and-try, with several misses before the limits of the plan can be perceived on the page and printed successfully. PlansPlus has a feature for demonstrating the size of the printable area on the page, given the scale. If the plan is then manipulated so that all the parts lie within those limits, then the plan can be printed on a single page in Print-to-Scale, and will not require multiple pages pasted together.
The Draw print region command in the Tools menu will display a rectangle on the plan which represents the amount of plan that will fit on a given page size at a given scale factor. The command invokes the dialog on the right:
The required data for the region/rectangle includes the page size and the scale, obviously. The page size can be queried directly from printers attached to the computer; at the top right the current default printer is listed, and in Paper dimensions its default page selection is displayed. The printer may be changed to another available printer, or the selected page size may be changed by clicking on the Select Printer button, which opens a standard printer dialog. To change the printer select from the list displayed; to change the page sizes, click the Properties button and do so. Return from the print dialog by clicking either Print or Apply.
Similarly, the current Punch! scale factor is displayed. It is displayed as a pure ratio: 1:36, for example, means the plan is reduced from full real-life by 36 times, and corresponds to an architect's 1" = 3' scale. All scales, English and metric, can be reduced to a true ratio; a draftsman's 1/8" = 1' is really 1:96, while and an engineer's 1" = 10' is 1:120. The ratio is what is displayed in the box. Pressing the Change Scale button will invoke the Plan Scale dialog which can be used to change the scale to any value required.
Below the scale box is a shrinkage value. The page sizes given by the printer driver to Windows should be accurate, but they are in millimeters. Print lines can be as small as 47 to the millimeter, and the amount of data need only be 1 print line too large to trigger the need for a second page, so it may be useful to shrink the region just a small amount so that everything inside the rectangle, and perhaps even the rectangle itself, will be on the one page. Also, printers are not usually capable of printing all the way to the page's edges, so shrinking from an actual page measurement may be needed. Particularly if the paper dimensions are input manually (see below), a shrinkage of from 1 to 3% or more may be prudent.
The box below shrinkage labelled Final scaled region dimensions displays the scale size of the region.
If the checkbox Manually enter size is checked, the printer selections are disabled, and the size display is enabled to allow for choosing a paper size from a list of common page formats, both English and metric. Note that after such a selection is made, the note in the selection box will be changed from the name of the paper size to its dimensions. In addition, a set of dimensions may be manually typed into the box. The dimensions will be assumed to be in inches if english units are currently in use in the drawing (selected in Punch!), or in millimeters if metric is in use. The format of the entry is to be w[.nnn] x h[.nnn], where w is the width across the page, and h is the height of the page. The [.nnn] represents optional decimal precision added to either width or height or both. The "x" (upper or lower case) is mandatory. Other measurement abbreviations, such as ", ' or mm are ignored as long as they are limited to following the measurement numbers. As is commonly the case, higher width than height indicates landscape mode, while the opposite is portrait mode.
Finally, near the bottom the Plan and Floor that the regional rectangle is to be drawn on is requested. It is filled in initially with the current values when PlansPlus was started. Only already existing floors may be chosen, as a PowerTool cannot create a floor in Punch!. You can create a floor in Punch! by simply placing some object on it, or on a floor above it.
The Draw Region button will create the region, which will appear in PlansPlus immediately. When PlansPlus exits back to Punch! the region rectangle will be passed back to it to be displayed there as well. Note that the rectangle is a plain rectangle drawn as if on the Detail plan by the Rectangle Tool. It may be modified and deleted at will without any effects to the plan.
For more information on printing large format, see The Ten Commandments of Punch! Basics, article XIa.
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