Printed drawings not scaling correctly (please help!)
Hi @myancer12
I’m sorry to hear that you are having trouble. There are a few considerations, like ensuring that your page size in Fusion matches your physical paper in the printer and that your drawing views are set at the right scale.
Once the setup is correct, you should look into calibrating the printer. Although we expect our prints to be perfect, each operating system, printer & print driver introduces a small variation that could affect the print. Take a look at this article for step by step instructions on calibration : https://clintbrown.co.uk/2021/04/08/fusion-360-calibrating-11-prints/
Clint Brown
Senior Product Manager - Autodesk Fusion
Book some time on my calendar
The Ultimate Guide to Drawing Automation
Have you tried measuring the PDF in Acrobat Reader to confirm the problem is from Fusion?
This is what I get. Note drawing is 2:1 so measured size is doubled but pretty accurate when scaling is taken into account.
Mark Hughes
Owner, Hughes Tooling
Did you find this post helpful? Feel free to Like this post.
Did your question get successfully answered? Then click on the ACCEPT SOLUTION button.
The paper size is sent to drawing as 11x17, the drawing is also sent to the printer as tabloid (11x17) scale 1:1.
In pdf if I measure it it comes out correct: 8.4" scales 1:40 = 28'
Ive uploaded the drawing and will now look at the first link posted by ClintBrown. It seems strange to me that a small variation in print setting would require 83.25% reduction in the print to actually print scaled correctly. That sort of scale difference is substantial so in order to get it printed correctly, the whole sheet has to reduce by nearly 17%. If we were talking a few percent I would accept its just a translation error and scale down appropriately, continue on with life.
If I look at the drawing view and note where the edges of my model are shown relative to the plot space, they are exactly where the printer is showing them. This makes me believe its not a printer translation error. Hopefully this makes sense, if you look at the most lower right point of the footer object in the drawing, you will see it stops directly above the 'r' in garage. When printed it is in the exact same spot and obviously the boarder/title box have not been skewed by 17%. Hence why I think this error is in the CAD program and I cant figure out why.
Ive taken screen shots of exactly what I've done because in other posts I've read its easier for those to understand trying to help. See next post too, I had to spit up.
Measure distance in pdf vs printed. In pdf if I measure it it comes out 8.4".
Can you edit your messages and paste the images into the message please? This forum is rubbish when it comes to viewing attachments. don't know why it doesn't auto embed them like all other forums!
Mark Hughes
Owner, Hughes Tooling
Did you find this post helpful? Feel free to Like this post.
Did your question get successfully answered? Then click on the ACCEPT SOLUTION button.
I also tried looking into a ClintBrowns article and have done a totally new test. Both 8.5x11 and 11x17 are skewed by the same factor for an unknown reason. (I cannot print to web as I am not a paying member, that function is greyed out)
@myancer12 wrote:
Measure distance in pdf vs printed. In pdf if I measure it it comes out correct: 8.4" scales 1:40 = 28'
Quote from first post in this thread.
@myancer12 wrote:
I have also tried printing to pdf, then sending to the printer with same error in scaling.
Just want to make this clear. So if you print to a PDF it measures correct in Acrobat but when you print the PDF to your printer it's incorrect?
Mark Hughes
Owner, Hughes Tooling
Did you find this post helpful? Feel free to Like this post.
Did your question get successfully answered? Then click on the ACCEPT SOLUTION button.
I was more interested if printing that PDF to your printer is correct. You said in the first post that printing a PDF was also wrong but I wanted to make sure you still have that problem with a PDF you've measured. If you do still have a scale problem with a PDF file that Acrobat says is the correct size, surely the scaling error is down to the printer or printer driver?
Something you might find helpful is editing the border and add a line to use as a ruler for checking the scale. Geometry that's part of the border or title block should always show 1:1 dimensions.
Mark
Mark Hughes
Owner, Hughes Tooling
Did you find this post helpful? Feel free to Like this post.
Did your question get successfully answered? Then click on the ACCEPT SOLUTION button.
