Alibre Atom: Printing Drawings – No Paper Layout Controls?? Centre-line limits?

[Nigel Graham 2Participant @nigelgraham2]

I’ve tried seaching the Help manual of course, but that doesn’t help me in this case at all! It tells you what it can do, but not in which variant of Alibre, and not how to ask it.

 

I created a drawing and wanted to print it.

Print Preview merely shows the images filling a white panel against a plain grey background, with no relationship to the paper. This implies it will expand the image right to the margins, irrespective of any scale you set.

It didn’t do that. Instead it printed to my set scale but with the image hard against the top and left hand edges of the paper; not symmetrically to the sheet.

 

The Print menu offers Portrait / Landscape and the Quality list but refers to the paper size as “Statement” with no list to select from. I’ve never seen that term before, in any software.

I’ve just tried printing with Scale to Fit engaged but that made no difference: the images and notes are all up the top-left corner as happened without Scale to Fit.

 

(The Manual advises creating custom templates to produce cohesive drawing sets, but it does not say how, nor if this facility exists in Atom. Though if you can’t set the drawing properly even on a blank sheet, it’s a bit academic. I simply add titles etc. as Notes, without “standardising” them – though I wish the Note tool’s default font was of readable size! I tried unsuccessfully to make a drawing template but with only an A4 printer available, it is pointless anyway.)

 

In short: are there any layout controls, and if so where, please?

+++

Centre-line limits:

What I’ve drawn is a disc valve with an arcuate slot in each of two parts. Each part lives on its own drawing.*

I could add the slot’s longitudinal centre-line in one of them, although it shows as a continuous line, not pecked like the drawing’s other centre-lines.

The second drawing refused to co-operate even though the features differ only in size. I selected the Centre-line “button”, selected the two opposite edges, nothing happened. Yet I could add the across centre-line referred to the semi-circular slot ends.

Eventually, I could only indicate the slot’s radius by an annotation, not proper dimension.

So what have I gone and done wrong there?

 

*(Is it possible to put two separate detail-drawings, from different model files, on one sheet? Normal industrial practice uses one page per part, but at the other extreme many model-engineering plans-sets are nightmares of large sheets covered with jumbles of dozens of parts. However, it could be useful for related, small detail components in a sub-assembly like that valve.)

[JasonBModerator @jasonb]

Nigel. When you started the drawing what size and layout did you choose for your paper. That is what will set the size, the rest of what you are talking about relates more to your printer not what you have done in Alibre. You scale the elevations and plans to fit that initial sheet size chosen.

This is the preview I get of a selected A4 sheet and I scaled the part to make full use of the sheet at the initial stage before adding dimensions and notes.

Send David the file re ctr lines. Possibly the two lines selected are not truely parallel

Yes you can put multiple parts on the same drawing. Click “sheets & Views” along the top blue bar and then select “standard” on the toolbar that comes up. This will take you to the same process of selecting plans and elevations to include as you got when you started the drawing.

[DiogenesParticipant @diogenes]

Edit

redundant post

[David JuppParticipant @davidjupp51506]

Nigel,

When creating the drawing, you should see a (almost certainly blue) sheet outline on screen – that represents the paper that you’ll eventually print on.  You can manually position your views inside that rectangle.  You can change view scale if desired to better fill the sheet.

The ‘Print Menu’ calls up the dialogue from your own printer installation – it’s not directly part of Atom3D, so I don’t know what the ‘Quality’ option is for sure – I’d guess that you may be using a photo-capable printer that offers different settings for the balance of speed/image quality (and possible ink saving).

As per Jason’s comment.  Create Package Files from the offending drawings and send to me (or to Alibre Support).  I’ll try to work out what’s happening.

 

As for templates – there’s less you can do in Atom3D than in higher versions, because you don’t have the tools for inserting fields and labels.  For that aspect you’d need to get someone with access to higher version to assist.

What you can do as regards templates in Atom3D is set things such as Default text font/size for notes.  Set you own layers in addition to the standard ones, customise the drawing border, add images/logos, and probably most useful of all you can add dimension styles that you find useful.   If these are set up in the template, they become available for all future drawings – so you don’t have to set them up each time (this can save a lot of time when detailing, if the default dimension style isn’t quite what you want).

A template is essentially just like any other 2D drawing.  The one important thing to remember is that if starting from an existing template you must ‘explode’ the drawing frame symbol, prior to saving your customised template (otherwise you may see some odd behaviour).

[JasonBModerator @jasonb]

Typed while David was posting

Just to expand a bit on what you may be experiencing Nigel. If I start a drawing on a blank A4 landscape sheet and accept the three default views at the scale Alibre comes up with and position them on the sheet I get a screen that looks like this. You only see the two side borders of your “sheet”

Zooming out a bit reduced the white “paper” which is bounded by the blue box that was previously touching the top and bottom bars.

I suspect you have just zoomed in on a similar layout and added your sizes etc. What I tend to do first is set a scale that suits the job in hand. If I were wanting to put multiple parts on that sheet then I would not alter the scale much if at all. But like my earlier post if I just want the sheet to show that part then increasing the scale of the part on the drawing is the way to do it.

First click the main view so the box with the corner arrows shows up

Then select scale from the top bar (may be a bit different on your Atom) and the box that comes up allows the scale to be altered I changed from 1:3 to 1:1, click Ok

This increases the scale of all elevations so now they don’t fit the sheet (Sheet is the rectangle)

So now you can drag the plan and elevation sto where you want them on the sheet, click each to bring up the box with corner arrows and then drag, they will only drag one way as they need to keep there relationship to the main elevation correct in the other direction. I don’t want the end view so just left that off the sheet but could depete it.

On the printer front “Statement” is an American paper size similar to A5. and not part of Alibre so must be related to your particular printer.

 

[David JuppParticipant @davidjupp51506]

I’ve just done a couple of experiments in Atom3D – even though Fields and Labels can’t be inserted from scratch in Atom3D, it does seem that existing fields and labels can be copy/pasted and even have content and target edited.

So Atom3D users can copy fields & labels from existing templates and paste them into a new template, and subsequently modify them.   They can also ‘Save As’ from an existing template to a new name/location and then modify.

For this to work – the ‘read only’ property must be removed from the template being copied from, and ‘Sketch on sheet’ needs to be activated to access the items.

[Nigel Graham 2Participant @nigelgraham2]

Thankyou very much.

 

I revised and corrected the drawings right back from their sketches. This meant a lot of testing because a small change here meant a difficult conflict there.

 

I’d not previously known “Statement” as a paper size, but that led to look more closely at the menus. The printer is a Hewlett-Packard ‘Deskjet’ and its driver offers a very long list of sizes.

I’d missed selecting the correct size at the right point, before adding the drawing itself. With that sorted, the layout rectangle re-appeared. I was also able to add a basic “title block” – just a Note holding suitably formatted lines of text, the second copied, pasted and edited from the first.

 

The missing centre-line was indeed by the two arcs being very slightly non-concentric.

Highly magnifying it revealed I’d accidentally used as a centre a rogue black dot left from a previous modification, very close to the correct origin for the outline. The fault was invisble except in an enlarged sketch edit.

 

I’ve now managed to complete two copies I can actually use – they are of the two main parts of a vacuum-brake valve, which I started making physically yesterday. Once all finished I’ll archive clean prints with the rest of the drawings for this, the club’s loco.

 

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