Printing an AutoCAD Drawing - AutoCAD 2011 and AutoCAD LT 2011: No Experience Required - page 781

CHAPtER 15
Printing an
AutoCAD Drawing
With today's equipment, there is no difference between printing and plot-
ting. Printing used to refer to smaller-format printers and plotting referred to
pen plotters, most of which were for plotting large sheets. But the terms are
now used interchangeably. Pen plotters have been virtually replaced by large-
format inkjet or laser plotters with a few additional settings not commonly
found on other printing devices. Otherwise, as far as AutoCAD is concerned,
the differences between plotters and laser, inkjet, and electrostatic printers
are minimal. In this topic, printing and plotting have the same meaning.
Plotting your drawing can be easy, even if your computer isn't connected to
a physical printer or plotter. The most common method of plotting is to use
an actual device connected to your computer; however, you can also plot to a
number of electronic formats. Whether you're plotting to an actual device or
to one of these electronic formats, you can easily manage printing with the
tools you'll learn about in this chapter.
Although you may have a variety of small-format and large-format plotters
attached to your computer, this chapter will assume as a standard the DWFx
ePlot (XPS Compatible).pc3 plotter. Since each plotter is slightly different,
standardizing on this one virtual device will ensure that you're able to follow
each of the steps as they are discussed in this chapter.
You will print the layouts inside the A-100.dwg , A-200.dwg , and C-101.dwg
drawings from a layout at its default Letter 8 ½ ″× 11 ″ (A4 - 210 mm × 297 mm)
sheet and at 24 ″× 36 ″ (A1 -594 mm × 841 mm) sheet sizes.
In addition to ensuring your ability to plot to each of these formats, plotting
to an electronic format similar to .dwf or .dwfx is not all that uncommon in
industry. There is often a need to keep an electronic record of each submittal of a
project, and the .dwf format is one of the ways this is possible. I'll discuss some
other electronic formats later in this chapter, but for now it's more important to