Learn the essential steps of exporting sheets to PDF, including how to ensure your drawings are printed to scale and how to properly configure all the settings. This article provides a thorough step-by-step walkthrough to make sure you get it right every time.
Key Insights
- When exporting sheets to PDF, it's essential to change the setting to 100% to ensure your drawings are printed to scale. Leaving it on 'fit to page' will not give accurate results.
- It's important to uncheck 'hide crop boundaries' for the full border to be visible around your elevations. This is a commonly overlooked setting that can affect the final output.
- You should always double check the exported PDF to ensure it's consistent with what you were expecting to see. The final exported file should be saved in a known location for easy access.
This lesson is a preview from our Revit for Interior Design Course Online (includes software) and Interior Design Professional Course Online (includes software & exam). Enroll in a course for detailed lessons, live instructor support, and project-based training.
Let's go ahead and export this sheet to PDF. I like to use this function here because it uses a pretty good PDF printer and not everybody has Adobe or Bluebeam or anything like that, so this works out really well. If I click on the export to PDF button here, it's going to pop up a dialog box and we can go through and set up our settings here.
And so one of the things that is commonly missed on PDFs that I see that get submitted is this setting right here. This one needs to be changed to 100%. If you leave it on fit to page, it will not be printed to scale and so we always want to be printing our drawings to scale.
We'll make sure that that is set correctly and then the page size, this is a pretty cool thing, it'll actually say use sheet size. So it's going to read what the sheet size is and it's going to use that for our print. The next thing you want to do is if you take a look at the options below here, there's one that says hide crop boundaries.
If you leave this checked, you will not have the border around your elevations and so you want to make sure to go ahead and uncheck that so that you can have the border around your elevations. Now we just need to go in and tell it what sheets that we want to have printed and so I could do this selected views and sheets and it says all sheets right now and that's not what we want so we're going to go and click the pencil here which is synonymous with edit and right now we look at it and all we see is the one sheet here and so if we go ahead and turn off a few of these things, sheets not in collections, those kinds of things, and then we just make sure all sheets is checked there and then if we do hide unchecked views and sheets then we get all the sheets that we're looking for. So I'm going to go ahead and print the three sheets we created 101,102, and 301 and hit select here.
It's asking if we want to save it for a future session. We do not because we're going to create a different one later anyway so we'll say no and then double check our settings. We've got it set up to zoom 100 using the sheet size and we're not hiding the crop boundaries.
Learn Interior Design
- Nationally accredited
- Create your own portfolio
- Free student software
- Learn at your convenience
- Authorized Autodesk training center
Next thing you want to do is you always want to make sure that you're printing to a location that you know about and so I'm going to browse to a location on mine and then you'll adjust this to have the right name. I'm just going to put midterm at the end of mine and then I'll hit export. So I'll navigate to that location.
I'm just going to open up the PDF so I could take a look at it and then whenever you do this you always want to double check. We'll just kind of run through to make sure everything is all set up the way that we had it before, that it looks consistent with what we were expecting to see and everything looks good here and so this file is ready to go. In the next lesson we're going to take a look at doing a lot of the similar stuff that we did here just at a different application.
We're going to look at a fitness center for our second project.
