You won’t want to miss the first Architectural Community Virtual Meetup. Make time on the 4th Tuesday of each month to connect online as a community to check in with other architects and ask your questions about Revit, AutoCAD, and other Autodesk software for architects. We’ll share tips & tricks at each meeting and will have open Q & A with architectural experts who will address your questions as well as suggestions. In July, we will have Michael Kilkelly, an architect who operates at the intersection of design and technology, as our guest speaker.
Michael is the founder of Space Command, a design and technology firm in Middletown, CT. He will talk with us about the content he created for the Autodesk Architect Learning Center. We will discuss how the content benefits your teams and ultimately, your clients.
I’m extremely pleased to share that we are very close to launching a new learning hub delivering training that will help architects collaborating with other disciplines or firms on the same projects learn how to coordinate better. Because it’s project-based, the new Connected Learning Hub is the ideal place to learn industry best practices and try new or unexplored features of our software using a practice project dataset we provide, which makes it ok to make mistakes. You can practice key workflows before implementing them on billable work. The best part is that it is geared toward the busy architectural professional. You’ll be able to improve your skills in just 15-20 minutes per day.
Learn more and register here to be notified when the learning center goes live.
I look forward to seeing you take advantage of the Architectural Community Virtual Meetup and the new Connected Learning Hub. Your success matters to us.
Many companies have their main sheet size set to 22×34 so they can plot large, and then half scale (11×17). However, there are many companies that are required to plot 24×36. This makes plotting half-scale plans a little more difficult. That said, it is still doable. Let’s look at the steps to “plot small, when the sheet is big.”
When you go to plot, you can either modify the layout’s page setup or create a named page setup that can be applied to all your layouts and used company-wide. This is what I recommend you do. Create all the layouts and named page setups you need for all the different printers/plotters in your company’s or personal drawing template (.DWT file).
To do this, open the .DWT file, and create all the layouts you use for the different sheet sizes/plotters you plot to at your company (don’t forget to create one for .PDF files, too, you can download soda pdf support, offers a free online PDF reader, PDF creator and PDF converter).
Next, right-click on the active layout and choose Page Setup Manager from the context menu. Now, in the Page Setup Manager dialog box, you should notice a few things. First, any “line” that is surrounded by an asterisk (*) is an actual layout. In addition, any rows that are not surrounded by an asterisk (*) are called named page setups.
Think of a named page setup just like a reference file. If you associate a named page setup to a layout (or layouts), then that named page setup is “linked” to those layouts and any changes you make to the named page setup will update all layouts that are associated to it (now that is automation).
To create a new named page setup, simply click the New button in the Page Setup Manager dialog box.
As you will notice, you are now editing a page setup in the Page Setup dialog box, just as you normally do if you were editing a layout’s page setup. First, create your standard 1:1 named page setups that plot 24x 36. Now, to do the half-size page setup set the appropriate settings for the right plotter, color/plot style table, Plot Option toggles, etc. Then, the key settings for plotting small are listed below:
A little note regarding the Plot offset values. These values will vary based upon the size of your border and where you want it placed in your layout. There are no exact values that work for all companies.
Now, to associate a named page setup with a layout, make sure you are in the correct layout, and then simply double-click the named page setup. You will now notice that the named page setup appears next to the layout name in parentheses.
And that’s it! Now anytime you create a new drawing you will have the ability to plot big or small.
Article by Seth Cohen
Brandon Loehr lives and breathes AutoCAD, but he doesn’t keep that knowledge just to himself. With helpful insights and tips, he helps thousands of people understand how to use AutoCAD.
Brandon’s 2-minute AutoCAD tips are undeniably good. So, we’d be remiss in not featuring a few of them here. Take a look and you can check out his entire series here.
