- Once you do have your drawing created
and all of your geometry looks great.
You've updated your revision block.
You've updated your title block.
Your notes are all looking great.
You have to share this with someone.
Now if you're not going to share
the native solid work strong
which I typically don't do, you're either going to save it
out as a PDF or you're going to print it.
And when you're printing this drawing,
this is where a lot of people struggle
because they'll go and try to print their drawing
and it doesn't come out the right size over and over again.
Here's a couple tips
for getting all your print settings right.
And your print to PDF settings right, as well.
So, first thing to note,
what is the size of the paper I'm working on?
This is a B size paper
which means it's an 11 inches tall by 17 inches long.
I'm going to go up to file,
and page set up, now already off the top.,
we have an issue.
If I go down here and my page set up,
I can see that my paper size is set to letter.
I actually have a larger paper size.
It's an ANSI B.
So I'm going to search for an ANSI B or a ledger size paper
because those are in fact the same.
So I have ledger right here.
I'm going to keep that as landscape.
Now you have two options here:
you can either scale it to fit
or you can scale a hundred percent.
If you don't need this print
so that people can actually use it to measure
and take scale dimensions off of,
then I would just keep it at scale to fit.
This way, it's always going to fit your paper size
no matter what size you use,
but we want to start by using the ledger size.
So now let's go ahead and click preview.
All right, we already have another issue.
You can see that my orientation is right.
It's printing a ledger out
but it's printing it portrait instead of landscape.
So let's hit close, go back to file, page set up.
And we can see here that, okay, well
it's not my orientation because I have it set to portrait
or landscape, it's because I'm using the ledger orientation.
So I'm going to drop down in here
and see if there's something better than I can use.
Let's go with a legal size.
That's going to be a little bit closer, better orientation.
Then I'll hit preview.
All right, this is looking better now.
The ledger goes vertically and the legal paper
can be switched orientations to go landscape.
So this looks like it's fitting a little bit nicer
on our page.
Now, depending on the printer that you have,
the sizes of your pages are going to change.
This is for the PDF creator that I'm using.
So if I go up here to file and print
and change this to Microsoft print to PDF, for example,
and now go to page set up, I'm going to have
some different size options available to me.
So if you don't have the size that you're looking for,
it might be driven by the printer that you have selected.
It's not always super obvious.
So go ahead and instead of going right to page set up,
you can go to print and then go to page setup
from there after you select the correct printer
that you want to use to print out your document.
Now, again, you can hit file, save as and create a PDF.
But if you use print to PDF,
you can go here as well and adjust all of the page set up
just like you would using any other traditional printer.
Always remember to use the preview down
at the bottom left to make sure everything looks appropriate
on the page and at least in a good scale.
So you can see everything and everything's included.
Then once you know that looks good
you go ahead and hit file print, and you're good to go.