The final version of QCAD 3 has been released last week!
In this blog article, I want to put the spotlight on one of the new features of QCAD 3 which might not get your attention right away: multipage printing.
QCAD 3 allows you to print a drawing on multiple pages at any desired scale. The printed pages can then be stitched, glued or taped together to a poster. One can also print cross hairs at the corners of each page for easier alignment. The page margins can be increased to create an overlap between the pages.
This is especially useful to print templates for sewing or cutting in real size.
The example screenshot at the right shows the print preview of a floor plan that is being printed at a scale of 1:100 on 8 sheets of paper.
To print your drawing at a given scale on multiple pages, simply follow these four steps:
- Load your drawing and switch to the print preview (File - Print Preview).
- Choose the desired scale in the options tool bar at the top or enter the desired scale factor.
- Click the button to automatically add as many pages as required to print the whole drawing:
Depending on the exact format of your drawing, switching the page orientation and clicking this button again might save you some paper. - Print the drawing (or export it as PDF for reviewing, sharing or later printing).
You can enable crop marks (cross hairs for easy alignment) in the drawing preferences under Edit - Drawing Preferences - Printing - Multi Pages - Print crop marks. If you print a drawing on many pages (and you don't like to solve puzzles) you might also want to print Page Tags which act as identifiers for every page (e.g. B3 is printed on the page in the second column, third row). Page tags can be enabled under Edit - Drawing Preferences - Printing - Page Tags.
You can download a PDF of the above example with crop marks and page tags enabled from here:
Andrew