Next to the plotter lies the outcome of half a morning's work: three stacks of A3, a fan of A4 sheets and two large prints that keep curling back up. Somewhere between sheet fourteen and eighteen the count went missing, one section view came out of the wrong tray with a strip of dimensions cut off, and nobody dares to say out loud whether the set is complete. The assembly crew leaves in an hour, and they simply want paper to take along.
Because paper is not dead. There is no screen hanging at the welding bench, an inspection body wants a set it can sign off, and a fitter on site has no use for a tablet with a dead battery. Printing drawings from Inventor is still a normal part of work preparation, and that is exactly where it hurts: not on that one sheet, but on the package of forty. In this article: how to print a complete drawing package in one go, how to handle mixed sheet sizes and scales, and how to prevent half-printed or wrongly scaled sets, among other things with Print and Sheet Size Up from the Thundercad toolbox.
Where paper still wins
The paperless workshop has been announced many times, but walk into an average production hall and you can see why it never arrived. At the saw and the welding bench, paper is unbeatable: you lay it next to the workpiece, put a pencil mark on every finished position, and it survives coolant, gloves and a drop on the floor. Assembly crews on site work from a binder, because a construction site rarely has wifi and always has dust. And inspections and handovers are still signed off on paper, sheet by sheet.
The digital track simply exists alongside it: the same set goes to work preparation and the archive as PDF. How to get that digital side right is covered in PDFs from Inventor that the shop floor can actually read; here we deal with the sheets that have to come out of the printer.
Why it is the package that fails, not the sheet
Anyone can print one drawing. Printing a package of forty is a different job, because it is the same series of choices forty times over: open the file, pick the printer, check tray and size, set the scale, print, next. With every repeat, concentration drops a little, and every choice is a chance for an outlier. The classics:
- the printer stalls halfway and nobody remembers exactly which sheets already came out;
- fit to page is still switched on from a previous job and quietly shrinks part of the set by a few percent, so the sheet no longer matches the scale promised in the title block;
- an A1 drawing rolls out of the A3 tray reduced, because the size was never checked;
- only sheet one of a multi-sheet drawing gets printed;
- a leftover print from an older revision is still lying next to the printer and quietly slides into the binder.
Every work preparator knows the result: a set that looks complete but is not. And because paper does not throw an error message, the discovery comes at the exact moment someone wants the missing sheet in their hands.
Mixed sizes and scales in one set
Most packages are not a tidy stack of A3. There is an A1 of the assembly, a couple of A2 sheets of welded groups and a clutch of A4 turned parts. For printing you then have two routes. Route one: print every sheet on its own size, small work on the office printer, large work on the plotter, and merge the stacks afterwards in the order of the set. Route two: make the package more uniform up front. The fewer different sizes, the fewer switches of printer and tray, and the fewer chances for outliers.
The second route does not require rebuilding any drawing. With Sheet Size Up you move a sheet that was chosen too tight one size up while the layout stays put, and with Sheet Size Down you pull a lone outlier back to the size of the rest of the package. Which sizes and scales to pick in the first place, and how to switch between them quickly, is covered in Choosing sheet size and scale wisely, and switching between them fast.
Then there is scale on paper. Agree that a printed set is printed at full size, so without fit to page, so the scale in the title block matches what is lying on the table. If you reduce on purpose, say an A1 on A3 for a work meeting, mark that set clearly as not to scale. The dimension values are always leading, but one fitter with a folding rule who does not know about the hidden reduction is enough for a wrong sawing length.
Choosing printer, tray and scale forty times in a row is exactly where a set dies. It can also be one action, with the same choices for the whole package.
Try 30 days freeThe whole package in one run
With Print from Thundercad you print a drawing package in one run instead of drawing by drawing. You point at the assembly, the associated drawings go to the printer in one go, and you make the choices once for the entire set. That saves more than clicks: it removes the variation. A set printed in one run has the same scale choice everywhere and the same order, and no sheet drops out because the phone rang halfway through.
Two habits make the run reliable. With a new printer or a changed tray, print one test sheet first and measure a known dimension; if it checks out, the rest can follow. And after a failure, do not continue from roughly where it stopped, but run the whole set again: paper is cheap, half a package is not.
Complete and in the right order out the door
A printed set is only finished when it is demonstrably complete, in an order the reader can use. Sort it the way the machine goes together: the assembly drawing on top, then per build group the welded groups with their parts behind them. Fold large sheets down to A4 with the title block visible, so the stack stays searchable without unfolding everything.
Close with a count check. Print a sheet list as a cover page, for example the parts list with drawing numbers, and count the sheets against that list. Thirty seconds of work, and it is the difference between "should be complete" and "is complete". When a new revision comes out, collect the old sheets straight away: the most dangerous drawing on the shop floor is a printed old version still lying under a welding clamp somewhere.
Frequently asked questions
Do I print drawings at full size or with fit to page?
At full size, so the scale on the sheet matches the paper. Fit to page shrinks quietly and turns every scale note into a small lie. If you reduce on purpose for reading or meetings, mark the set clearly as not to scale and keep it away from the shop floor.
What do I do with one large sheet in an otherwise small package?
Make a deliberate choice between two options: print it separately on the plotter and fold it to the size of the rest, or level the sheet beforehand with Sheet Size Down if the content allows it. What you do not want is the large sheet rolling out of the A3 tray reduced, as the only sheet in the set that is off scale.
How do I prevent half-printed sets?
Print the package in one run instead of drawing by drawing, count the sheets against a sheet list, and rerun the whole job after a printer failure. Print from Thundercad turns that into a habit; the free trial month lets you try it on your own drawing packages.