Equipping professionals with the ability to efficiently and accurately convert design models to PDF format is essential in today's digital design industry. This article provides an insightful guide on how to make this process efficient and error-free using common PDF printers, with careful attention to settings and scales.
Key Insights:
- The article stresses the importance of accurately setting up the PDF printer, including selecting the right page size, ensuring the model is centered, and setting the zoom to 100%.
- Efficiency is emphasized by choosing the option to print multiple selected views on sheets at once, instead of one at a time. This is particularly beneficial when dealing with large models.
- The final key point highlights the need to double-check the output for errors or missing elements, such as unreferenced view tags. It is recommended to go through the print process again if any discrepancies are noticed, to ensure the final PDF is of high-quality and ready for sharing.
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Our next step here is going to be to print this to PDF. So it's great that we have a model, it's great that we have all this information that we can share with our design consultants, but ultimately our deliverable is going to be PDF, I'd say nine out of ten times. We want to make sure that we are comfortable doing that, we can do it pretty efficiently, and make sure that we can print things to scale because that's also going to be very important as well.
And so there are a number of PDF printers out there. If you don't have one already, we'll put some information in the resources tab that'll have links to ones that we've used in the past that are pretty good and light programs that you're not having to worry about downloading many stuff and having issues with them interacting or corrupting other software on your computer. So in our case, we're going to use Print.
So I'll go to File and Print, and there's just a couple of things that we need to make sure we have set up here. So first off, we want to make sure that we pick the right PDF printer. In our case, we have Adobe PDF, and we want to make sure we select the appropriate Settings to print to.
And so this gets overlooked quite a bit, but it's actually the most important step. We want to make sure we go into Setup under Settings here, and then we want to set our Page Size. And so we use the 11 × 17 Page Size in the landscape format.
We're going to leave it on center, and we'll set it to zoom for 100%. If you notice, when I went to zoom, it jumped from center to offset, but we're going to put it back on center here. The next thing we'll want to do is, if you look at the options here, if you created sections or anything else that aren't referenced on a sheet, you don't want those to print.
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We'll click Hide Unreferenced View Tags, and they won't show up here as well. When I hit OK, now that I'm set up to print, I can click Preview, and I can see what it's going to look like. And this looks like a pretty good preview of our print here, so I'm content with that.
So I can hit click Preview, and it'll take me out of the Settings, which is fine. I'll just go back into Print, and we don't want to print one sheet at a time because we'll just have to print them over and over again, right? If we do it one at a time, so instead of printing once, we'd have to print four times. So what we'll do is we'll pick this Selected Views on Sheets option here, and we'll click Select, and then it'll allow me to just pick the sheets that I want to print.
I can hit OK, and there's not too much in this model, so it's pretty easy to see, but this looks pretty good. It'll ask you if you want to save it, and so if you're planning on printing this set over and over again, you can say yes and give it a name. In our case, it's just the four sheets, so it's not that big of a deal to select it again.
The next thing we want to do, this is probably the second most important thing that gets missed, is instead of saying create separate files, we want to do Combine Multiple Selected Views into a Single PDF. After we've done that, we'll just hit OK, and it's going to print. First thing it's always going to do, it's going to ask us where we want to save it.
So I'll go into our BIM101 class files folder, and I'm going to save it as BIM101 Project One, and then just your first and last name to make the PDF here, and we'll say Save. It'll go through a process where it's going to print all of our sheets here, and what it'll do is it'll print to PDF. So I want you to notice, when we were working on this floor plan before, you may have saw that there was no information in these boxes here, and now there are.
You can see our Roof Plan looks pretty good, Elevations look good, and we're good to go. So what I would encourage you to do is, after you make this PDF, is to take a look at it, and if you see something's wrong, fix it, and reprint the PDF until you get it to a way that you like. And so I'm looking at ours here, and actually only saw one thing that I didn't like, and that was this is our Room Separator Line that we didn't turn off.
And so what we could do is we could get out of this file here. We can go back in, and I could do it from the floor plan here, and simply just double click in to activate the view, and I can right click. I can say hide in view by category, because I don't want to see any of those on, and then deactivate the view, and just go through that print process again.
And so that's a great way to make sure that you're putting out a quality product, and it's just an excellent process to have something that's really easy to email to pretty much anybody who has a computer would have access to. So I'll just go ahead and finalize that by printing it one more time. The keyboard shortcut here is CTRL P for Print, just like a lot of other Windows programs, but essentially we just hit OK, because we know it's all set up, and I can just save over my last one, and then I should have a PDF that's ready to go.
So just make sure you double check the work, make sure everything's in there, and you should be good.
