zoom scale

How can I get the drawing to fill the page and keep a reasonable scale such as 1'=10"

Comments

  • When a printer is selected in the Print dialog the application takes into account the physical limits of the printer's ability to access areas adjacent to the edges of the paper. A physical margin of 5mm or 1/4" or something like that is quite common; it's a region that the printer just can't get to.

    What you can do is to select a virtual PDF printer as the destination. There are quite a few free ones out there and, in addition, Bricscad has added a "Print as PDF.pc3" virtual printer with the current release. When PDF is selected as the printer then the entire area of the page is accessible.

    For scaling, you can select the viewport and select a standard or custom scale from the properties bar. If you're printing from model space, use the Plot Scale section of the Print dialog.

  • Joe Dunfee
    edited June 2017

    I think what the original poster is seeking, is an automatic feature to zoom in as far as any standard scale. That would take some custom programming to do. I can see the usefulness of such a utility program. It might follow the following process;

    1) Zoom all
    2) Read the current scale.
    3) Subtract a certain amount to allow a reasonable margin.
    4) Compare the current scale to a list of preferred scales.
    5) Zoom to the closest scale that will fit.

    The list of preferred scales is certainly going to vary between countries and companies. To me, even the list of default scales is missing some that I would like to have for us English units people. So, I have edited the list using the scalelistedit command. This list is saved in the drawing, so you have to put it in your template drawing to keep it.

    A novice programmer should be able to handle this project. Perhaps I will take it up eventually. But, my program would be in VBA, which has fallen out of favor for customizing CAD programs.

    -Joe

  • Joe Dunfee
    edited July 2017

    I found a LISP routine that seems to do what we are seeking.

    This is from the Autodesk forums. https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/visual-lisp-autolisp-and-general/zoom-to-nearest-scale/td-p/1377693
    This is a relatively old posting and the author is no longer active on that forum under that user name.

    Creates new commands;
    VPSC [View Port SCale] If you are in a viewport this will zoom out to the next standard scale.
    CTH [Change Text Height] will prompt you to choose some text and then will scale it based on the current scale, and assuming you want the text to be 3.5mm high.

    The list of standard scales is internal to this LISP program. There are two lists, Imperial and Metric. The list is supposed to be chosen based on your LUNITS units setting in the drawing. But, when I try it, it only seems to affect how it reports the scale, rather than which list of scales it uses.

    HE PROGRAM HAS A BUG, It reports the scale on the command line as the next increment higher than what is actually used. I don't have enough of a command of the LISP programming language to figure out where the problem is.

    If you use the command without first changing into a viewport, the program simply end, and does not report that the command should be initiated from within a viewport.

    Note that on the discussion he later adds some features, such as scaling dimensions. But, I didn't want that, so just chose this earlier version. The scale reporting bug is still present in the most recent version.

    [EDIT, Two more notes. The program ignores the viewport lock zoom setting, which I think is good, because that setting is primarily to prevent you from accidentally changing the zoom. And the CTH command is caught up in that zoom scale bug, because it makes the text half the height it should be.]

    -Joe

  • Cyberdyne_T800
    edited July 2017

    One foot = 10 inches? The most reasonable scale close to that would be 1:1 wouldn't it since 10 inches is nearly a foot anyway.

    What are you drawing that a scale of 1'=10" is necessary?

  • Cyberdyne_T800
    edited July 2017

    Oops.

This discussion has been closed.