Making patterns

[Anthony Mirra]

Hello, I am new here so forgive me if this is supposed to be posted elsewhere. I am trying to make a pattern for a small project, and the overall dimensions of each piece should fit on a sheet of printer paper (5" x 10") and (4.5" x 4.5"). I have drawn it up in Sketchup, but when I print it it came out on 4 pieces of paper for me to cut up and tape back together. I understand that there isn't anything I can do about this using Sketchup. Does anyone have a suggestion on for another program to use, or another way to go about this process? I just discovered Inkscape a few minutes ago, so I will be learning that shortly. Does anyone have any experience with Inkscape that can give me some pointers? Thanks in advance.

[glenn bradley]

On my Windows 10 machine I frequently use the "snipping tool" to capture the part of the image I am after, save it to some folder under a name that represents it well and print it from there.

What SketchUp would print:

SU Prt Ex 1.JPG

A 'snip' of the SketchUp workspace:


SU Prt Ex 2.jpg

[Warren Wilson]

No experience -- but I've watched Matthias Wandel do this many times using his own "Big Print"program. I don't know what he charges, but I sure do like his work. http://woodgears.ca/bigprint/index.html

[John TenEyck]

It should work with SketchUp on one piece of paper. If you have multiple parts hide all but the one you want to print. Get that part centered on your screen then go to print preview and see if it's all on one page. You may need to switch from landscape to portrait, or the other way around, and you may have to play with some of the other print settings but if your part is smaller than your paper you should be able to print it on a single page at full scale.

John

[Dave Richards]

Assuming your printer will print the 10 in. dimension without running into a non-printable border region, you can print it on one sheet from SketchUp. I'm not sure where you found something to tell you it isn't possible. If you want some one-on-one help with it, I can do that. Drop me a PM with your contact info.