AutoCAD® 2010 For Dummies®

Chapter 16. The Plot Thickens

In This Chapter

• Configuring printers and plotters

• Plotting model space

• Plotting to scale

• Plotting paper space layouts

• Plotting lineweights and colors

• Controlling plotting with plot styles

• Troubleshooting plotting

Despite the infinitesimally small number of offices without a computer (or two) on every desk, many people still want or need to work with either easily readable electronic drawings (can you spell PDF?) or actual, dead-tree paper drawings. You may need to give hard-copy prints or PDFs to your less savvy colleagues who don't have AutoCAD. You may want to make some quick paper prints to pore over during your bus ride home. You may even find that checking drawings the old-fashioned way — with a hard-copy print and a red pencil — turns up errors that managed to remain hidden on the computer screen.

Whatever the reason, you'll want to print drawings at some point — probably sooner rather than later. Depending on where you are in a project, plotting is the pop quiz, mid-term, or final exam of your drawing-making semester. This chapter helps you ace the test.

You Say Printing, I Say Plotting

Plotting originally meant creating hard-copy output on a device that was capable of printing on larger sheets, such as D size or E size (or A1 or A0 for the metrically inclined), that measure several feet (or a meter or more) on a side. (See Chapter 4 for information about drafting paper sizes.) These plotters often used pens to draw, robot-fashion, on large sheets of vellum ...