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Print Basics

Steve Hunter

Having covered the basics of setting up layers, colors and linetypes to adopt specific CAD standards, it's important to know how to configure and change your print settings to ensure reliable hardcopy output — in other words, we need to know about printing.

IntelliCAD 98 supports printing to plotters with the WinLINE plotter driver, manufactured by Software Mechanics Pty. Ltd. This company has developed a version of its WinLINE driver specifically for IntelliCAD 98 and you’ll find it on the CD, in the directory \IntelliCAD 98\Drivers\Printers. For complete instructions on installing this driver, see the file Readme.Install.NT.txt or Readme.Install.W95.txt, depending on your operating system.

[Ed: This article applies to prining with IntelliCAD 98 1.0a, b, and c. The printing facilities were dramatically overhauled on service release d. Click here for more info.]

Configuring a printer

To configure this driver, choose Settings and Printers from the Windows Start Menu and double-click on the Add Printer icon. Depending on your operating system, the options from here will vary a little, but choose the Have Disk button when prompted and browse to the printers folder on the installation CD to choose oemsetup.inf. A dialogue box provides options for most common plotters.

The WinLINE printer driver supports most common plotters

Further plotter configuration is available from the Print Setup option in IntelliCAD's File menu. By clicking on the Properties button for the newly installed printer, a dialogue box with tabs titled Page Setup and Advanced provides a number of flexible options for print configuration. Options within the Advanced tab include paper size, orientation and resolution. A range of Carousel options provide detailed setup of pen table information.

Color, line width and density can be independently configured for each pen and these pen settings can be stored to a Carousel (car) file. By saving and loading various carousel files we have the flexibility to work with multiple pen setups for different clients and varying sheet sizes. To change the default settings for all printing, it's best to set the printer options at the Windows level.

Carousel options provide detailed pen configuration

Making sure what you see is what you get

After the Print Settings are fairly well established, it's well worth doing a Print Preview prior to the actual print. Print Preview shows how the selected area fits on to the print media at the nominated scale factor. From here you can select the Print Settings button and toggle between the Settings dialogue box and the preview to fine-tune the output. Selecting Print from the File menu takes you directly to the Print Settings dialogue. These settings alter the print configuration for the current drawing only and settings revert to standard Windows defaults for subsequent drawings.

A Print Preview is highly recommended.

For some settings, such as sheet size, orientation and pen setup, you need to return to the Print Setup dialogue box. From the Print Settings dialogue you can jump straight into Print Setup or Preview and work within these three main print areas to optimize the output.

The Print Settings dialogue works interactively with Print Preview.

Specifying a print area

There has been much discussion relating to the most reliable method of specifying print area. While many companies configure their system to reliably print limits or extents, the only way you can really be sure of what you're getting is to specify a windowed print area. This is also the only option that deals with the possibility of a single drawing file containing multiple sheets. I recommend using Window as the most consistently reliable option.

With this brief guide you should be able to configure a printer and store carousel files to manage multiple plotter configurations. The Print button on the Standard toolbar sends a drawing to the default IntelliCAD printer using the most recently established settings — so only use this button when you're absolutely confident of all print settings.

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