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line width scaling when printing

Posted: Fri Sep 03, 2010 7:29 pm
by hungerburg
in printouts qCAD does not scale line widths with the drawing:

eg. I draw a two by two meters box with 2mm line width.
- when printing with a scale of say 1:10, the strokes in the printout are still 2mm.
- when printing to pdf 1:1 and printing the pdf fit to say A4 paper, strokes are much thinner.

Is there some common understanding between dxf processing applications how to handle stroke width in scaled printing?

--
peter

Posted: Mon Sep 06, 2010 9:36 pm
by andrew
This behavior originates from traditional drafting. Pen widths are standardized to a few fixed pen widths. The pen width should not indicate the size or width of a real world object in CAD but rather the role of a line in a drawing (a 0.25mm wide line might indicate a visible edge, a 0.13mm line might be a part of a dimension entity or a hidden edge, etc.). Scaling line widths would work against these standards.

Note that you should always be aware at what scale / on what paper size the drawing will be printed before you start with a drawing. Line width standards often depend on paper sizes but not in a straight forward way that could be achieved with a simple line width scale factor.

I see

Posted: Thu Sep 09, 2010 2:07 pm
by hungerburg
I see, this sound awfully reasonable :) Thank You Andrew.