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Printing 1:1 not possible?

WouterPortegijs
1-Newbie

Printing 1:1 not possible?

Or am I doing something wrong here? What is happening... I made a model and a drawing from it in annotation. I put some measurements and since I was lazy and did not want measure out all the material I just printed the drawing. Ofcourse I measured the output and it is off by 2%. After carefully going through the options. So I choose my printer lanscape(that is how the drawing was setup) went to the next tab called drawing and position center all zero / source sheet / scale factor 1 / content drawing / transformations pens black and white (thin) pattern lenght standard. Now this produces on my printer a print wich is about 2% to small. Now I wondered if it was my printer so I also printed it as a pdf resulting in a 1% to small drawing. intrigued by this I installed 2 third party pdf printer drivers and got 2 files wich were aprox 3% to big..... I am really wondering what is going on here. And my question would be. Is it possible to make a print that would be ""correct"", so 100mm is actually a line of 100mm?
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11 REPLIES 11
Not applicable
(To:WouterPortegijs)

You don't mention margin settings at all. I supposed you checked those as well, though. Claus

I did not mention any margins for, as far as I can see (printer driver, help file, print settings) there are none. So no I did not adjust any margins and neither checked them. If you could tell me how I can change them and how they would interact with the scale I'd be a very happy printer I will however add something, in the printer driver for my printer(hp laserjet 1200) there is an option to scale. This is off naturally and they are neither on on the pdf settings. Now this morning I thought about exporting it to another program to print it from here, but here I get stuck with the limitations of the pe version. Which normally would not be a problem since I do not need to use another program.....

I would put on dimensions and nip this in the bud. The error is in the print driver and printer. Went through an exercise here sending the same drawing to 4 different printers/plotters and two of the came out the same (not correct, but the same), while the other two were different and not correct. If you need accuracy, then put on dimensions, do not measure the drawing.

Now I agree that most off the time I would use the dimensions for part making, but in this case I really would like a template.... Now printers are for probably most people the most accurate devices they will ever own and/or operate. Now I find it very difficult to swallow that a cad program is not consistent with the scale it prints. Most programs are, for example everybody would find it strange if you'd print a letter and the size of the font is arbitrarily changed. That the error would be in the print driver I doubt. Connsidering if I use other programs prints are accurate. p.s. the position of the print compared to the paper has a mm or so play, but the accuracy within the print should be very high since most printers are 600dpi or more.
Not applicable
(To:WouterPortegijs)

anonymous wrote:

That the error would be in the print driver I doubt. Connsidering if I use other programs prints are accurate.

Now I was prepared for this question and a bit awaiting it For a quick check I used inkscape and drew 2 100mm lines printed them and they were 100mm. For the same check I used inkscape to import the pdf's created within cocreate and they all measured the same as when I printed those from acrobat. The problem is that those pdf's were all different in size but not because of changing the scale parameter. To be honest I think that cocreate does fit to page if you fill in the scale close to 1 and the information is close to fitting the page. this instead of dropping some information from the print. I used the statement about the letters, for most ppl understand that wysiwyg only works if there is a direct correlation between how it looks on screen and on print. This is the reason for the fact that word changes you page every time you change your printer because of the print margins. Personally I think this can be done in a more gracious way then microsoft decided, but that is a whole different story. For the real q's you just asked: A point is defined nowadays as 1/72 of an inch(25,4mm) and the typographic symbol to points is defined in the design of the font. Wich enables you to actually measure if you are inclined to . p.s. I had to look this up since I did not know the definition myself but I knew it existed. For the rest I and other's in my surrounding in the past used template from prints and they always worked out quite well. This was from various software. But mostly autocad. The question I asked was mostly because I was wondering if I missed something or if there was another reason for it not being 1:1. I understand that most ppl prefer there whole page being printed instead of the edge falling outside of the print margins, but that is where the fit to page option comes in to play, I thought.

I don't think you understand what I'm saying. Our output is the same everytime, but the output of the printers varies. Print out to a file and then send that file to 5 different printers. That fill will NOT change while sitting on your drive, but the output will be different from every printer. The fact is they just aren't that accurate (still more accurate than what you can cut with scissors though )
Not applicable
(To:ptc-1796973)

OK, so the summary so far is (correct me if I'm wrong): <ul> <li> You tested printing in Inkscape, and you got 1:1 scale. <li> You couldn't (quite) get 1:1 scale when printing from Modeling PE. <li> GaryB tested printing from Modeling PE and got correct results for some printer drivers, and slightly incorrect ones from others. </ul> Claus

I misread indeed what you ment. As far as I understand now: You make one pdf, postscript or hpgl file and that printfile you send to the 5 printers. What you get is 5 different prints, how much do they differ? Now I am curious what you use to send that printfile to the printers and what the settings are of the printers. If you would open the printfile on your pc and measure it there, what the size is compared to the prints and the original cocreate drawing? I personally do not see any measurable difference to the printfile and the print, however the printfile and the drawing in cocreate differ ±2%. The error of measuring in this case would be about 0.5mm within the print. Mind you, I do not look at the placement on the paper(registration) since that can vary considered even between prints. Most printers do about 2mm per manufactures datasheet, this however is still less then the error I see from cocreate to print which is about halve a cm within a A4 print, which I think is quite a lot. And referring to the scissors I think I can handle to be more precise then that, even if I have to measure things out beforehand. And That summary seems to be correct. It really looks like one of my settings is of somewhere in cocreate if I look at it this way, I am curious which one.

I just did some more testing and the outcome is that: printing scale 1 is not possible. Since the program will fit to page. However printing at scale 0.999999 works marvelously How I tested, I just made a small 100mm box, made the 2d drawing from it and then took away all the sheet information. At scale set at 1 the print was fitted to the page(got a 200mm square) and at scale 0.999999 it was nicely printed on the paper(a 100mm square for all my measure capabilities). I also tried 0.5 and that also printed at the correct scale(50mmsquare). When I was testing before I also tried changing the scale but then I adjusted for the error so I printed manually at the same scale cocreate was fitting the page to the paper. I know that should have been the other way around and it might have been that way but it wasn't what I expected so I couldn't relate I might remember wrongly now. Anyway at the time I could not grasp what was going on so i did not pursue changing the scale from 1 further For me the problem is solved, and if anybody ever needs to print a template or is worried about measurements are taken from a print instead of the written data(I know it happens) they can also use this. I hope the cocreate team can do something with this info.

I know this is too little, too late for wportegijs, since the original thread was almost a year ago, but I have had the same problem, and have found a resolution. So hopefully this will help anyone else with the same issue. For some reason, when you select the "Factor" radio box, it does not stick. If you go back and print that same thing a second time, you will find that it has reverted back to "Fit" again. You have to actually click in the "Factor" field and hit enter. I think

wportegijs found that when he entered a scale of 0.9999..., he got what he wanted. Even if you just click in the field and hit enter to keep the 1:1 scale factor, it will stick. You will get an error message saying something about the maximum scale factor, but it will still print correctly.

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