Title Block Template Print Margins

Dan Crosby

 I'm trying to construct a DWT to contain some title block templates and I'm frustrated to find I (apparently) can't define the printable area. I know these are 'hardcoded' by the printer/plotter hardware, but I should still be able to define what I want the software to attempt to do.

I'm trying to do it generically (i.e., for use by anyone), so I don't want to pick one of our office printers in "Page Setup..." which will obviously be specific to this location. If I pick "None" I get a nice list of default paper sizes but no control over the printable area. It looks like the area is set to accommodate large saddle plotters and thus they have much larger margins than typical laser printers (for example). I don't think many of our users will have plotters and this unused margin space would be quite annoying.

Is there anyway to set the size of the print margins?

Sascha Boskovski

What if you define a pdf-printer as default printer?
Thats the way I do it and it works fine with a Templatedrawing as well.
Our default printer is pdf-creator. The drawings first get printed as a pdf (i anyway have to store it digitally).
I adjusted that the pdf opens after saving and my paperprintsettings are made in Adobe Reader.

Dan Crosby

Hi Sascha,

That sounds like a possibility, but doesn't it leave you with the same issue as picking a printer? i.e., it will complain (or not work?) if the user doesn't have whatever PDF printer I choose to use to set it up? It seems ridiculous to have a templating system for layouts if you a can't specify a generic template. Given that paper comes in standard sizes, you'd think there would be some way to work this out...

Scott McKenzie

 Hi Dan:

The maximum printable area is defined by each individual printer due to their mechanics and limitations and this is not something that BricsCAD can modify, rather a print is either scaled or cropped to fit within the bounding box defined by the printable area.  

For my template I drew a rectangle that was, for a D Sheet 24"x 36" and placed it on the defpoints layer, this represents the edges of the paper, I then offset this inward by 1/2" to create the outer box for my border - I did this on one of the layout tabs.  When I print I use the extents option and adjust the scale factor to 1:1 and everything fits - the outer rectangle is actually cropped off and not printed as it would fall outside of the maximum printer boundaries.  If I am doing a check print I just use the fit to paper option and print on 11x17.  The 1/2" margin works for what I have been doing over the years on multiple printers.  If you try to print your drawing at a larger scale on a sheet the program won't complain, it will scale the print up and crop off what doesn't fit with in the printable area.  AutoCAD had a nice feature where the paper orientation/size image on the print dialog would show red borders if the drawing was scaled such that it was larger than could fit within the printable paper area.

Dan Crosby

Hi Scott,

Thanks for you input...I think I need to try a few things out. However, what lead me to this was that, in BricsCAD, for a layout if you choose 'Page Setup...' you have the option of "None" as your printer/plotter. This gives you built in options for ISO and imperial paper sizes. This is all good, and offers (I thought) a way to set up templates for different paper sizes without tying them to specific hardware.

You pick one of these and have to go with whatever printable area is pre-configured (I used some code to discover, for example, that the margins are 20mm to the left and right and 7.5mm top and bottom, or vice versa, depending on orientation). These appear to be fixed values independent of paper size - meaning they become more and more significant as paper size reduces  - 40mm of margin on an A4 sheet is a lot! I just thought these values must come from somewhere and perhaps I could alter them. They may actually be hard-coded in the software though.