Lesson 9 - Drawing Settings, Printing and Interoperability

This lesson describes how to change drawing settings and how to prepare a drawing for printing. Furthermore, the DXF import and export and the PDF export of drawings are described.

9.1 Coordinate system

9.1.1 Natural drawing units

In order to set the natural units run the command SetNaturalUnit. You can choose to draw in millimeters [mm], in centimeters [cm] or in meters [m]. The numerical values you enter refer to the natural unit.

9.1.2 Drawing scale

For the purpose of setting the drawing scale run the command SetScale. Any positive scale factor is allowed, default is 100. Common drawing scales are 500, 100, 50, 20, 10, 5 and 1. Once the drawing scale is set the line widths, line patterns and text sizes are automatically adapted so that they are right on the printed paper. The figures below show the same drawing extract in different scales.

scale 100 scale 50 scale 200

9.1.3 User coordinate system

Besides the main coordinate system the user can set an own coordinate system - the user coordinate system (UCS). Therefore he runs the command SetUCS. According to the main coordinate system a UCS is rotated about an angle and translated about a vector that is entered as a point.

Example: We want to draw parallel lines at an angle of 30 degrees. One line shall start at the point (1, 1). The lengths of all lines shall be 2.0 natural units. Firstly, we set the user coordinate system with a 30 degrees angle and translate it to (1, 1). Now we draw 3 parallel lines as shown in the figure below.

ucs step 1

If we now reset the UCS to 0 degree rotation and (0, 0) translation the drawing will look like this:

ucs step 2

9.2 Component TitleBlock

Once the drawing content is completed the drawing's title block including the title, the drawer's name, the scale etc. can be added by running the command AddTitleBlock. An input dialog supports entering the title block's properties.

title block dialog

In order to place the title block on the drawing the insertion point needs to be constructed. CADEMIA adds a single component that can be commonly modified via the feature dialog (see Attibutes and features section).

title block

9.3 Printing

CADEMIA provides for various printing methods. In order to print a CADEMIA drawing on different platforms run the command Print and follow the instructions below.
  1. Select the printing method that fits your operating system. Default is Windows.
  2. Contruct the rectangular printing area on the basis of 2 points.
  3. Enter the right and downward printing offset in order to easily adjust the drawing position on the paper. Default is 0.0 mm.
  4. Printing method


Example: We want to print a drawing that already contains an A4 title block. After choosing Windows as operating system we construct the printing area by picking the outer bounds of the title block component. In order to place the title block exactly on an A4 paper we set the right and downward offset to "-5.0" mm. Then we select the printer. On the page format form we need to adapt all margins according to our defined offset and set the values to 5.0 mm. If we now press the print button our drawing will be printed.

Hint: Check scale before printing.

9.4 Interoperability

CADEMIA facilitates the interchange of drawings with other applications. The DXF format and the PDF format are supported.

9.4.1 DXF

The Drawing Interchange or Exchange Format (DXF) is a CAD data file format developed by Autodesk (http://www.autodesk.com). CADEMIA supports both the import and the export of DXF drawing files.

In order to import a DXF file run the command ImportDXF from the File menu. Since the drawing scale and the natural unit are not stored in a DXF file the CADEMIA database needs to be set up properly in advance. A file dialog supports the selecting of the DXF file to be imported.

For the purpose of exporting a CADEMIA drawing to a DXF file run the command ExportDXF from the File menu.

9.4.2 PDF

The Portable Document Format (PDF) is a well-known and popular file format for documents developed by Adobe Systems (http://www.adobe.com). In order to export a rectangular extract of the CADEMIA drawing to a PDF file run the command ExportPDF.

9.5 Exercise

Load the drawings from the exercises 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, set proper scales and add title blocks. Subsequently, print or export the drawings.