Explore the meticulous process of finalizing a drawing file in AutoCAD as we clean up errors and import important legends before printing. Learn how to navigate through the different settings and functions in AutoCAD to ensure your final product is polished and error-free.
Key Insights
- It's essential to clean up any errors in your drawing before printing. This includes removing unnecessary drawing callouts and importing necessary legends like the Keynotes legend for the floor plan.
- When preparing to print a drawing, ensure the correct settings are applied, such as the plotter, paper size, layout, color table file, and scale. It's also useful to preview your drawing before printing to verify all components are correct and legible.
- There may be additional steps needed when dealing with certain objects in AutoCAD. For example, when using the multiliter style, hidden geometry on a layer may need to be addressed separately. Also, freezing certain layers can help avoid unwanted elements appearing in the final plot.
This lesson is a preview from our CAD Certificate Course Online (includes software) and AutoCAD Certification Online (includes software & exam). Enroll in a course for detailed lessons, live instructor support, and project-based training.
Let's jump into our A202 sheet file and do a final check there. So I'm going to go File, Open, jump into my Sheets folder, A202, once again we get that image warning, so I'm going to right-click, Detach, and we can see here that we have a couple of different problems with our drawing. We need to clean these up before we can print this drawing, and we also want to bring in our Keynotes legend for the floor plan.
First things first, I can see that our drawing callouts are in this drawing. This is great, it helps us on the floor plan, but we don't need them in here. So I'm going to go to my Layer drop-down, find the AnnoSims48 and turn it off, and AnnoSims96, turn that off as well.
There we go, and now I need to bring in that floor plan Keynotes legend. Attach, floor plan Keynotes, open, I'll specify on screen, and I'll place it in this top right corner. Make sure that you select the object and confirm that it's on the AATTLB layer, mine is, and now we can go through and turn off all of our no-plots.
Make sure you zoom in once again and confirm all of your Keynotes match, and that they're all viewed on this screen, because remember this is a cropped view, and there's a chance that especially number 1 over here is off too far to the left. When you've confirmed that everything looks right, zoom extents and CTRL S to save. Now that that's done, we can go ahead and print our A201 and A202 sheet files.
We'll come back to the elevation and roof plan, add those Keynotes, and finish with the A301 sheet file, but these are ready to print, so let's go ahead and do that. I'm going to jump into A201 and go CTRL P to print. This is going to bring up the plot window, and let's go through the settings one at a time.
Learn AutoCAD
- Nationally accredited
- Create your own portfolio
- Free student software
- Learn at your convenience
- Authorized Autodesk training center
My plotter is going to be DWG to PDF, my paper size should be set automatically at ANSI full bleed D, I want to print the layout, and I don't need to do a subplot to offset. There's a chance that your color table file is assigned to the wrong color table file. Make sure it is the VDCI color table file, and make sure the scale is 1 to 1, not fit to paper or anything else.
Let's go ahead and preview this. You can zoom in and pan around, make sure that all your geometry is in there, make sure that everything is legible, and I want to showcase one oddity of AutoCAD when you're using certain objects. If we zoom into our Keynote files here in the kitchen, you can see the Keynotes themselves are not visible for the 1.5", the 2 and the 3 here do not have duplicate objects.
But our multiliter style, which is the 4, the 5, and the 8, all have an extra square. This is because the geometry on that layer is hidden, but because of the way layer 0 works in association with the multiliter, we need to take it one extra step. Additionally, I can see that I accidentally left on my annotations at 1 inch equals a foot.
So I need to hit escape, escape, and we'll do that plot again after we fix these layers. The first thing I want to do is to jump into the viewport, come down, and make these layers, the annotation layers, not only hidden, we see that we hid AnnoSims24, but also frozen. I'm going to do this for the 96, the 24, and the 12, and the 96 here as well.
The only thing I need in this drawing is the 48, so we really want to clean these up. Now that I've frozen this layer, AnnoSims24, even though they weren't visible on my drawing, they were only visible in the plot. They will now be invisible and not plotted when I plot this.
Control-P again. I'm going to see all the same settings. If yours reset, go ahead and pause the video and make them match again.
I'm going to go preview, and now when we zoom in, we see that freezing the layer turned off those extra squares in my geometry. I'm going to zoom extents. I'm going to zoom out and hit the plot button in the top left to plot this to PDF.
I'm going to place this in my sheets folder, and at the end of each sheet, it's going to append the name of the paper space it was printed from. You can keep that in or delete it. I tend to delete it, so this is just going to say CAT301-A201, and then feel free to add a dash and your initials at the end.
I'll hit save to create the PDF. Let's jump into CAT301-A202 and do the same. Before I go Control-P, I'm going to make sure that I do the same freezing.
This time I want to freeze the 48 layers. I'm going to freeze here and freeze here. Control-P, DWG to PDF, 34 × 22, VDCI color table file.
Let's go preview. As I zoom in and pan around, I see that everything looks correct. Excellent.
I'm going to go print. Once again, I'm going to remove VDCI 22 × 34 and replace it with my initials. Save.
Now that those sheet files have been plotted and created as PDFs, I don't need them open in my AutoCAD file, so I'll zoom extents, Control-S to save, close A202, and go to A201, zoom extents, Control-S to save, and close A201. In the next video, we will add our keynotes to the elevation and roof plan and generate two more keynotes files. See you there.
