Producing multi-page drawings

[cjs94]

I am looking for some advice on technique here. I need to produce a set of drawings for a product, which comprise manufacturing drawings of a number of sub-assemblies (third-angle) and an isometric general assembly drawing, showing how everything fits together. The final output is a multi-page PDF.

What is considered 'best practice' for these drawings? Would you put all related drawings in a single DWG/DXF? If so, how do you control pagination and PDF output? Or would you put each page in a separate DWG/DXF and manually merge the PDFs later?

Thanks,
Chris

[andrew]

I'd put them into one single drawing and use the multipage printing feature of QCAD (see http://www.qcad.org/rsforum/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=3317 steps 6 and 12).

[cjs94]

Thanks, I've looked at that link but I think it implies that the whole drawing is printed at a single scale? How would you manage different page scales? Can you assign different print scales for each page?

Regards,
Chris

[andrew]

I think it implies that the whole drawing is printed at a single scale?

Yes.

How would you manage different page scales? Can you assign different print scales for each page?

This is not possible, no. You'd have to scale those parts and assign appropriate scale factors to the dimensions or indeed split your drawing up into multiple drawing files.

[Husky]

Hi Chris,

here is my workflow in cases like that:
I put everything in one drawing,
prepare page frames for each scale ...

Husky-2016.12.05-01.png (99.91 KiB) Viewed 5271 times

... and I make sure that I can reach easily those frames with the multi page print tool from QCad ...

Husky-2016.12.05-02.png (119.58 KiB) Viewed 5271 times

... print separately each scale like all pages with the 1"= 8" scale,
all pages with the 1" = 16" etc etc into a single pdf.

Then I merge those pdf together with a Freeware PDF tool into a single document - job done customer not confused and happy.

[cjs94]

That looks really smart, thank you. How do you manage the scaling of dimension lines, when you're using multiple scales?

[Husky]

How do you manage the scaling of dimension lines, when you're using multiple scales?

I adjust regarding to the scaling the "Dimension" settings below Drawing Preferences. Temporary - just for the print task!