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Centering a plot - without margins!!!


Anne-kzn

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What have they done to plotting in autocad 2017? In the past, if I told it to centre a plot it would do just that. Now it creates enormous margins, even when I go into the paper size and set the margins to 0 - it then places my drawing in the bottom left hand corner of the page. The only way I can get something roughly in the middle of the page is not to check 'center the plot' and physically put in x and y figures. Which means much toing and froing to see whether I've got the thing more or less in the middle.

 

I'm hoping there is a setting, hidden somewhere, that will let me do as I used to do in the past - centre the plot with the smallest margins my PRINTER will allow. My printer more or less prints to the edge of the page all round, why has autocad suddenly decided I need margins? I've tried all the options of full bleed, expand, etc. The only way I can see round it is to create my own paper sizes. Haven't tried that option yet, because it's tedious in the extreme.

 

I'm really hoping it's something I'm doing wrong, and not yet another shortcoming of this programme.

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Paper space. And I plotted another drawing a short while ago, and it didn't have the same issue - the plot centred, whether I used cutepdf or dwg to pdf. I found the problem in several drawings during the course of the day, will have to work out what they have in common.

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I'm sure AutoCAD did not do anything different. I think you are missing that you need to configure your printer settings which you, or someone else, did for your previous version.

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One idea which is what we have on Titleblocks is to make a rectangle around them at the same dimension as the paper size. This makes it really easy to set it up to sit where we want it. From there you can plot extents, window, or layout and it sits perfect on the paper.

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Thanks, rkent - I forgot to say that all the files I had problems with I was printing to pdf. I work from home for a big practice, and my printer is an A4 printer, which I only use in autocad to print test plots to check on line thicknesses, etc. (or when I need to solve a difficult area and resort to pencil) so I mostly plot to pdf. It's getting late here now, I'll have to check tomorrow on which files are giving me the problem, and what the difference is.

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Thanks, rkent - I forgot to say that all the files I had problems with I was printing to pdf. I work from home for a big practice, and my printer is an A4 printer, which I only use in autocad to print test plots to check on line thicknesses, etc. (or when I need to solve a difficult area and resort to pencil) so I mostly plot to pdf. It's getting late here now, I'll have to check tomorrow on which files are giving me the problem, and what the difference is.

 

I do remember a number of years ago when I upgraded to a new release of AutoCAD that I had a fair number of files that would not plot correctly, always leaving a large margin along the bottom. I finally just rebuilt the files as I came across them because I could not figure out what was causing it. I have read of others having the same problem so while it doesn't happen a lot there are reported cases, with mine being one of them.

 

So I would suggest creating a new Layout and inserting a new title block and copy items over and test. Or just start a new drawing, draw a boundary equal to a drawing border and try plotting as a test.

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Bigal,

 

Yes, I'm using them together - window, centre the plot. I have title sheets set up with their origins just above 0,0, so that I use 0,0 as the starting point for my plot window. I'm using the same page setup that I used in previous versions of autocad. My sheet sizes are mainly A0, sometimes A3, and my drawings have the pdf plotter configured in the page setup.

 

The problem is intermittent - it isn't happening on all my drawings, and I can't work out what the difference is. One of the drawings I had problems with yesterday plotted fine this morning. I had an email response from rkent which doesn't seem to be showing up here, and I will take his advice and redo the page setup, borders, etc. of drawings where I do have the problem.

 

Sorry rkent - missed the fact that your post was on another page...

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The window coordinates are stored per drawing. If you have multiple layouts to plot using window from the same drawing you may have issues. Creating layouts that can be plotted using layout instead makes plotting a breeze.

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I have had this problem also but only plotting A4 pdf with around 50 dwgs std details a few would plot with the margin wrong, having a automated lisp for plotting meant a few came out wrong, the bigger margin left side so you could bind would come out on the right side. In the end I rotated the dwgs 180 and then they plotted perfect. I dont change these dwg's so just live with it.

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