Printing w/ Visio 2000

[ColsHub]

Can somebody give me a step-by-step tutorial on how to print a floorplan
(100' x 500') on 8.5 x 11 paper? Please include all settings. Thanks

 

[J Kallay]

It would be better for you to understand the different parameters than to
have someone give you all of the settings (particularly as you yourself did
not provide all of the necessary information, such as what paper size and
drawing scale you are using).

In Visio there are three different "spaces", if you will: the model space
(which in your case is 100' x 500'), the drawing space (represented by the
drawing page), and the printer space (what comes out of your printer). The
mapping from the model space to the drawing space is accomplished with a
drawing scale, which for a floor plan should probably be a standard
architectural scale (e.g. 1/8"=1'). This scale would make your floor plan
roughly 12" x 60" in Visio drawing units. Obviously this can fit on neither
a 8.5" x 11" drawing page or on an 8.5" x 11" printed page. If you left
your drawing page at a standard 8.5" x 11" size, most of your floor plan
would be off the drawing page, and wouldn't get printed. You most likely
would want to expand your drawing page to fit the contents. This leaves you
with a choice of how to print the drawing. You can have Visio tile the
drawing over several pages, or you can apply a "print zoom," which is really
another scaling transformation. With print zoom you can get Visio to fit
the drawing onto a single printed page. The down side to this is that your
drawing scale is no longer valid- 1/8" will not equal 1' on your printed
floor plan. If an accurate scale is important to you and you still want
your drawing to fit on a single printed page then choose a smaller scale and
don't use any print zooming (1/48"=1' would scale your floor plan down to 2"
x 10").

 

[ColsHub]

Thanks J, the fog is slowly lifting. Let's see if I have it right-
File/ Page setup/ Print setup, printer/paper size determines the size of the
paper in my printer, say, Letter. If I set Zoom to fit 1:1, whatever I do
after here will be scaled to 8.5x11.
File/ Page setup/ Page size/ Page size determines the XY ratio of the
drawing page that I see on my screen. This will be shrunk (or stretched?) to
fit on the paper size when I print.
File/ Page setup/ Drawing scale/ drawing scale tells me what the real world
dimensions are represented by the drawing page.

So.... if the space I want to map is 100' x 500', and I want to print it on
8.5x11 paper, paper size = 8.5x11, Zoom = 1:1, Page size = 10x50(? doesn't
really matter?), drawing scale = 1:10. (I'd probably use 1:12 to give me some
room around the edges).

I think what happened is I started playing around with some of these
settings but I didn't make note of what the original settings was. After that
I was messing around with 4 variables. The odds of getting something usefull
is pretty slim.

 

[J Kallay]

If you don't care what scale you end up with on the printed page, use a
printer page size of 8.5" x 11", a standard architectural scale, a page
that's sized to fit the contents, and a print zoom that gets everything onto
one printed page. The advantage to using a standard architectural scale is
that you can be assured that the shapes on your page are being used with a
scale they were designed for.

If you want to have a known scale on your printout, use 8.5 in. x 11 in.
printer page size, set the size of the drawing page to match the printed
page, and choose a scale that gets the contents all onto the page. The
advantage to having the printer and drawing page sizes match is that you
have a What You See is What You Get correspondence between the drawing on
your monitor and on the printed page.

In option 1 you're leaving the drawing scale alone, and playing with print
zoom and drawing page size. In option 2 you leave the print zoom at 100%
and page size matching the printer page, and play with the drawing scale.
As you concluded yourself, where people get into trouble is when they play
with all three variables at the same time.

 

[Doug.S]

another alternative is to "print" to a PDF "printer" with 8.5x11 as output
of what is shown on the screen.

Then do actual print from the .pdf file

Doug.S