Printing

Printing or Publishing Engineering drawings

“wysiwyg” – what you see, is what you get – your file will print as it is shown on screen.  Turn off display of reference geometry (planes and csys), switch to hidden line for parts, no hidden line for GAs.  Always do a test print and then fine tune the drawing.  Although hidden lines show in grey on the screen they will print as the standard dashed lines.

Two main options for publishing your drawing, you can send it directly to the printer or you can export as a PDF

If you are using the lab config files these options are in the Common tab for quick access.

 

Printer

File > Print > Print Settings/Preview

 

For your scale to make sense the drawing must be printed at 100%:

Settings > Model tab > Plot > Full Plot

 

Publish to PDF

File > Save As > Export

Check your line weights (thickness’s) carefully in the exported PDF, if they are not appropriate then you will need to use the pen table file (see below) to control them.

 

 

Note: Viewing PDFs in Acrobat – Turning off Line Weight

When viewing a .pdf engineering drawing in Acrobat you can show all lines at 1px regardless of the zoom % – Ctrl + 5

 

Pen Tables

The ‘pen‘ refers to plotters which have pens which are picked up by the plotter to draw the lines.

In the lab config files you will find a .pnt file which defines the line weights for each line colour.  The printer and PDF settings have the option to use the .pnt file rather than the default line weights.

The .pnt can be opened in a text editor to modify the line weights.

C:ProgramDataPTCpdf_pen_table.pnt

Change the dimension after the pen names – Pen 1 is the thickness for geometry edges

 

 

Config options for laser

To adjust line weight on laser printers – File > Options > pen[n]_line_weight

Pens 1 to 8 are assigned to different drawing entities

pen1 – solid edges – set to 2 as default but as long as you haven’t got too much small detail [lines will overlap] might be better set to 3

pen2 – dimensions