Howdy Folks,
here is an alternative tool chain to print sketches and the like at 1 to 1 scale. Along with the OP's use case, I've seen others put it to good use gluing the prints down on wood to mark where holes get drilled, or edges cut. I recently used it to check the outlines of my drawings of a plastic shell that I was copying before I tried to 3D print a new one.
I found that LibreCAD which was forked from QCAD version 2, is also open source, and has good support for setting the desired print scale, and tiling prints that span more than one page of a given size.
See:
https://librecad.org/
I see from this thread that there is a feature request to Allow Selection of Print Area and Scale:
issue #4413. Since LibreCAD is also open source, perhaps you could incorporate some of its code here if the Copylefts are compatible.
First off, the needed functionality in LibreCAD is only available in versions 2.2.0 and later. At the time of this post, I had to build it from source to get a usable version. See:
https://librecad.readthedocs.io/en/late ... html#build
or
https://github.com/LibreCAD/LibreCAD/wi ... rom-source
Once you have LibreCAD, the first step is to set the units the same in both FreeCAD and LibreCAD (FC and LC). This is because you'll probably export your 2D drawings in dxf files which are unit-less, meaning they don't contain any info on what units the drawing is in. You could also export / import in dwg format if you have those librarys, (LibreDWG, or ODAFileConverter).
In FC you can go to: Edit -> Preferences -> General -> Units to check your settings.
Though I read that internelly it always uses mm.
In LC you should go here: Options -> Application Preferences -> Defaults
The export function is built into the core of FC so you don't need to load a particular workbench to access it. First select one or more items in the FC tree view that you wish to export. You can hold down the control or command key to select several at once.
Then go to File -> Export and make sure your exporting to dxf, or dwg and you have the proper libraries for that option. Perhaps in later versions of FC the libraries are loaded automatically.
There are two ways to use LC, via the GUI or command line interfaces.
For the GUI see:
https://librecad.readthedocs.io/en/late ... etion.html
For the command line see:
https://github.com/LibreCAD/LibreCAD/pull/1023/
Basically you go to the print preview, and set the scale to 1:1 and check that the part of the drawing you want is slid over the page area.
For multi-page prints with or without unprintable border areas on each page see:
https://librecad.readthedocs.io/en/late ... d-printing
The command line version incorporates a command line tool from QCAD called dxf2pdf. If you go to where the LC binary ended up on a Linux system, you can make a shortcut for dxf2pdf like this:
Here is an example command to generate a four page pdf of your dxf on letter sized paper:
Code: Select all
dxf2pdf -p216x279 -c -s1 -z2x2 Example.dxf
Though I'm not sure how to adjust the location of the drawing on the page from the command line, other than centering it.
Please feel free to help clarify anything here that's vauge or incorrect.
Best,
Clif