Rescaling

2D CAD software for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux
Mikerosen
Posts: 339
Joined: Sun Dec 11, 2011 6:16 pm
Location: Seattle, WA, USA
Contact:

Rescaling

Post by Mikerosen »

Eric,

This is a problem of my own making, but...

I generally do my drawings at 1:12. When I'm done, I use the Scale function to get them to fit in the page bounds, for printing.

Invariably, I will see something I missed: a line, a dimension...

In order for things to be correct, I need to get back to that original scale. Sometimes, it's easy: I reduced to 80%, I need to rescale by 125%. But usually, it's not that straightforward. Would it be possible for you to implement a "revert to original size" or something like that?

Or, is there a better way for me to do this? (No, "Don't screw up!" Is not an option!)

EDIT: This just came up, in real life, real time! A client asked me to make a couple of changes to the drawing, and I have no idea how to get back to the original size.
Mike Rosen
Seattle, WA, USA

Mac OS Ventura 13.1, iOS 11.4.1 on iPad Pro
Eric Pousse
Posts: 1064
Joined: Sat Dec 03, 2011 12:31 pm
Location: Tours - France

Re: Rescaling

Post by Eric Pousse »

Bonjour Mike,

When I begin a drawing, I choose the dimension of the printing page that I want, A4 or A3... or A0 or more.
And then according to the dimensions of what I have to draw, I choose the scale of the drawing to have it into my page.
Exactly as I have to do by hands.
The drawing with RealCADD is doing with the concept of WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get).
It is absolutely not the same in Autocad...
But sometime we have to use the "Scale" command because something has change.
But I think that this must be an exception.
If you change the scale only for printing, why don't you scale the output into the printing dialog?
For example, sometime I made drawing at 1/50eme and I want to print it at 1/100eme.
And to do that, I don't scale the drawing in RealCADD, I leave it at 1/50eme but I call "Page SetUp" and choose 50% for the scale of printing and my drawing is printing 2 times smaller.

If you don't have empty your trash, you can find in it previous versions of your drawing.
Each time you save a drawing, the previous version is send to the trash.

Merci.
Eric Pousse
Mikerosen
Posts: 339
Joined: Sun Dec 11, 2011 6:16 pm
Location: Seattle, WA, USA
Contact:

Re: Rescaling

Post by Mikerosen »

Eric,

I'll certainly look at scaling for the print setup dialogue. That sounds like it will do it.

I'll try, and let you know.

Thanks, as always.

EDIT: OK, I tried, and I'm unclear on the concept. I did a drawing, deliberately oversized. I went to Page Setup, and scaled to 75%. Then, I got this screen:
page setup.png
page setup.png (25.3 KiB) Viewed 10687 times
What does this mean? My paper size hasn't changed, it's still US letter. And, how can I see how it fits in the page bounds? It seems to me that it should say, the paper size is 8 x 10.2, and the DRAWING size is 6.5 x 9.5 (or, whatever.) And then, I still have to drag it into the corner, where it overlaps the page bounds, and trust that it will be right?

So it looks like what I need to do is save my drawing as it was done, and use a copy to scale for printing. The scaling operation is great, except that it should allow "in scale" operations. After all, I can stay at the same scale regardless of the VIEW percentage. I can move something 2", and it moves 2" on the drawing. I think that it should be the same, after I rescale.
Mike Rosen
Seattle, WA, USA

Mac OS Ventura 13.1, iOS 11.4.1 on iPad Pro
Eric Pousse
Posts: 1064
Joined: Sat Dec 03, 2011 12:31 pm
Location: Tours - France

Re: Rescaling

Post by Eric Pousse »

Sorry Mike, my explanation was not complete.
Mikerosen wrote:What does this mean? My paper size hasn't changed, it's still US letter.
Yes, but the dimensions of the page of printer are larger...
So, simply fix the drawing size at Width = *1 and Height = *1 if you want one page.
It is done. (Theoretically)

Thanks.
Eric Pousse
Mikerosen
Posts: 339
Joined: Sun Dec 11, 2011 6:16 pm
Location: Seattle, WA, USA
Contact:

Re: Rescaling

Post by Mikerosen »

Sorry, Eric. I don't like the system. (But that's just my opinion, of course!)

I think I'll stick to my two-drawing idea.
Mike Rosen
Seattle, WA, USA

Mac OS Ventura 13.1, iOS 11.4.1 on iPad Pro
debenriver
Posts: 696
Joined: Sat Dec 03, 2011 9:19 pm
Location: Maine USA and Suffolk England
Contact:

Re: Rescaling

Post by debenriver »

I suppose I'm going to poke my nose into this discussion – hard to resist!

As Eric said, traditionally, Mac CAD programs are organised so that you set the scale of your drawing to suit the size of paper that you intend to use. This is exactly what you do on a drafting board with pen-&-ink and paper/vellum. In fact a lot of programs (like ClarisCad) wouldn't even let you put objects outside the drawing boundaries. So the "Mac community" is not used to scaling drawings to print them – you choose the scale right from the start rather than when you come to print, just like you would if you were drawing on paper.

RC labelling is indeed confusing when it comes to print percentages and page setup etc. And this is made more difficult with US paper sizes which are not so easily scaleable as ISO paper sizes (A-series, B-series).

It's easier to envision if you use A-series page set-ups because they all have the long side/short side ratio of √2, so scaling them by 66.6667% (67% in practical terms) moves you from one size to the next. And if you fold A3 paper in half, you have A4 and so on up and down the series.

Start with an A3 drawing and draw a rectangle that pretty much fills the page. Page setup will be 294 x 420.

Now go to page setup again and select A4 paper and scale of 67% (which makes A3 into A4). You will see that it says "Page of printer" 294 x 412. (the height difference is due to margin settings – neglect it for this conversation).

What the "Page of printer" is trying to say is that "I can print a drawing that is 294 x 420 (A3) on a piece of paper that is 210 x 294 (A4) at the scale you have selected"

And if, in the Drawing Size menu, you make the width and height •1, it will adjust the size of your drawing to the size of the paper that you have selected and you can see that your rectangle fits the new size (plus or minus the damn margins).

I'm not convinced that this has clarified matters much – but at least I know what I mean!!

George
Mikerosen
Posts: 339
Joined: Sun Dec 11, 2011 6:16 pm
Location: Seattle, WA, USA
Contact:

Re: Rescaling

Post by Mikerosen »

George,
Thanks, I think...

My problem comes from my DrawingBoard roots. There, you didn't have to choose a paper size. You drew your first element, whether it was 2" x 6", or 9' by 12'. Didn't matter. You could zoom in or out to get it all on the page, or to isolate a segment. Once it was drawn, you had a "fit to page" command. It would get your drawing on the paper size you selected, and give you the scale, generally something like 1:14.632. I would change that to something sensible, like 1:16, and it fit. You could even tell it to maintain text and dimension size. Line size stayed the same through all of this.

And even when you did this, you could still go in and make changes. In other words, the DRAWING SIZE never changed, even though you fit it to a particular size of paper.
Mike Rosen
Seattle, WA, USA

Mac OS Ventura 13.1, iOS 11.4.1 on iPad Pro
Eric Pousse
Posts: 1064
Joined: Sat Dec 03, 2011 12:31 pm
Location: Tours - France

Re: Rescaling

Post by Eric Pousse »

Mikerosen wrote:My problem comes from my DrawingBoard roots. There, you didn't have to choose a paper size. You drew your first element, whether it was 2" x 6", or 9' by 12'. Didn't matter. You could zoom in or out to get it all on the page, or to isolate a segment. Once it was drawn, you had a "fit to page" command. It would get your drawing on the paper size you selected, and give you the scale, generally something like 1:14.632. I would change that to something sensible, like 1:16, and it fit. You could even tell it to maintain text and dimension size. Line size stayed the same through all of this.

And even when you did this, you could still go in and make changes. In other words, the DRAWING SIZE never changed, even though you fit it to a particular size of paper.
Mike,

But like this, you can not have a true WYSIWYG drawing.
I want that all my drawings have the same spacing between each dimensions lines and between dimensions lines and drawing for example.
And you can't control that, if you change the scale.
It is truly the Mac concept to have exactly on the screen what you will have on the printer.
As a old Mac user, I can't imagine an other way to work.
For example, I can't understand that Autocad can't allow to have a white back color for objects.
Or need a call to redraw when I do a zoom in to update the drawing, are we in 2014?
But I am not oppose to improve some features.

Thanks.
Eric Pousse
Mikerosen
Posts: 339
Joined: Sun Dec 11, 2011 6:16 pm
Location: Seattle, WA, USA
Contact:

Re: Rescaling

Post by Mikerosen »

Eric,

In DB, that was true. The relationship between all elements was the same, regardless of the viewing size. True WYSIWYG.

Scale didn't come into play until you fit the drawing to the print page. And even then, all that it did was automatically reduce the view to fit on the page. Nothing else really changed, except that that you could maintain text and dimension text sizes. And that was an option.

Now, maybe that isn't scaling in the same sense as you use the word. I never actually printed out a drawing and measured it with a scale rule. For my purposes (drawing a picture of a wall unit) it didn't matter. It wasn't a working drawing, just a way to show a client how the unit would look once built.

I'll keep trying to find a way for me to achieve this in RC. I'm sure that we can come up with something.

Thanks for staying with me, on this.
Mike Rosen
Seattle, WA, USA

Mac OS Ventura 13.1, iOS 11.4.1 on iPad Pro
debenriver
Posts: 696
Joined: Sat Dec 03, 2011 9:19 pm
Location: Maine USA and Suffolk England
Contact:

Re: Rescaling

Post by debenriver »

Mike – All my drawings, when printed out, have to be to scale (I mean a scale that is on a scale rule) and that is true of pretty much all engineering, constructional and architectural etc. drawings. So starting with a scale in mind is not so much of a hardship – in fact it seems normal to me.

You could perhaps try something like I do – I have to prepare most of by drawings for CNC cutting at full size and provide them as dxf files – but I also have to provide a pdf version so that the builder (and the cnc shop) know what the dxf file is supposed to produce.

I commonly provide the pdf's as 11" x 17" (which works for A3 as well) at 1:10 scale. So for the full size drawing I set a custom size paper at 2790mm x 4320mm (which is near enough 110" x 170") Then I make the full size drawing and save it as a dxf file. Then I scale it by 0.1, both x and y, and it is a 1:10 drawing fitting 11" x 17" paper and I save it as a pdf file for printing or viewing.

You could set yourself a custom paper size of US Arch. C which is 17' x 22" and has the same 3:4 ratio as US Letter. Then when you are done and want to print it, scale everything, including text, by 50% and it should be a perfect fit on US Letter. If you use 18-point text on the original, it will scale to 9-point and the text should all be in the same relative positions etc. For something even bigger you could use US Arch. E which is 35 x 44 (so still a 3:4 ratio).

For me personally, if I knew I was going to print on US letter as the final output, I would simply select a scale where the drawing fitted from the get-go and not bother with all the scaling stuff.

After all, RC is really accurate at all scales and you can zoom as much as you wish (specially with the new "zoom path width" option deselected). Scale really has no other function than to get a certain sized drawing on a certain sized bit of paper – on the computer screen it is immaterial because of the ability to zoom in and out.

The only snag with drawing to scale is that if you have two drawings one at say 1:15 and one at 1:10. When you copy and paste from one to the other you have to rescale the pasted object to match the scale of the recipient drawing. ClarisCad had a very useful feature whereby you could select to rescale when pasting, so as to paste at the scale of the recipient drawing.

Eric – that would be good option to consider in RC – perhaps ⌃⌘V with a placement option like ⌥⌘V has – that would be really good!

The function already exists for Library objects (Put at scale option) – I draw all my Library objects at 1:1 and then use the Put at scale option – works really well!

Cheers -- George
Post Reply