Overview

• Setting up a drawing to be printed

• Using the Plot dialog box

• Assigning lineweights to layers in your drawing

• Selecting the part of your drawing to print

• Previewing a print

• Printing a layout

• Looking at plot styles

First of all, with today's equipment, there is no difference between printing and plotting. Printing used to refer to smaller-format printers, and plotting used to refer to pen plotters, most of which were for plotting large sheets. But the terms are now used almost interchangeably. Pen plotters have a few extra settings that other printing devices don't have. Otherwise, as far as AutoCAD is concerned, the differences between plotters and laser-jet, ink-jet, dot-matrix, and electrostatic printers are minimal. In this book, printing and plotting mean the same thing.

Getting your drawing onto paper can be very easy or very hard, depending on whether your computer is connected to a printer that has been set up to print AutoCAD drawings and depending on whether AutoCAD has been configured to work with your printer. If these initial conditions are met, you can handily manage printing with the tools you'll learn in this chapter. If you don't have the initial setup, you'll need to get some help either to set up your system to make AutoCAD work properly with your printer or to find out how your system is already set up to print AutoCAD drawings.

You'll be using a couple of standard setup configurations between AutoCAD and printers to move through the...