Printing a schematic

Fit Sheet scales the sheet to fill the page and is the one to leave it on — it needs no aiming, and it's what a multi-sheet board uses. It never magnifies, so a small circuit prints at size rather than blown up.

1:1 pins the zoom to true scale: one inch on the schematic is one inch on paper. Pan to position the drawing; the zoom stays put.

Manual prints whatever the paper rectangle frames at whatever zoom you happen to be at, magnification included — the mode for a close-up of one corner of a dense sheet. Anything that falls outside the border is clipped rather than bleeding across the title block.

Sixteen sizes, portrait and landscape: 4×6" and 5×7" index cards, Half-Letter, A5, Letter, A4, and the large engineering sheets — Tabloid 11×17", A3, ANSI C 17×22" and ANSI D 22×34". A schematic dense enough to need a C-size sheet no longer has to shrink onto letter paper. Landscape Letter is the default, since that's the shape most schematics want.

Right-click a board or a sheet in the browser tree and choose Drawing properties… — or press the button in the Print tool — to fill in the drawing title, revision, company, who drew it, who checked it, and the date. It prints in the title block and saves with the project.

The fields sit at two levels, matching how a real drawing set works. Company and the names belong to the board and reach every sheet, so you type them once. A title or a revision typed on a sheet applies to that sheet only; leaving it blank means "same as the board", and the box shows you the value it will inherit so an empty field never looks like a blank line on the paper. Each sheet can also carry its own note, which prints just above the title block.

The date is a field, not a stamp applied the moment you press print. A drawing carries the date it was issued, so reprinting something you released in March doesn't quietly re-date it to today. Leave it empty and today's date is used.

Alongside those, the block reports the sheet number and count, the part count on the sheet, and the scale the page actually came out at — 1:1, 1:2.4, or 2:1 if you magnified it.

Switch them on and the frame gains lettered rows and numbered columns around the edge, so "it's in C3" means something to whoever is reading the print. How many you get follows the paper size — a letter sheet gets a handful, an ANSI D sheet gets a usable grid — because a fixed count would put 8"-wide zones on a large sheet and defeat the purpose. Row letters skip I, O and Q, which are too easy to read as 1 and 0 on a photocopy.

A board with more than one schematic offers a Sheets choice: this sheet, or all of them. All sheets fits each page on its own and comes out as one multi-page document, so a six-sheet board needs no attention per sheet. Because framing follows the camera and a camera can only frame one sheet, the scale choice is Fit Sheet whenever you're printing them all.

The sheet prints as black line art on white — a schematic on paper is a document, not a screenshot of a theme. Reference designators and values follow the toggles on the strip at the bottom of the sheet: hide them on screen and they're hidden on paper, so what you framed is what prints.

Test points and meters print, because where you put them is part of the document and a printed sheet is what someone takes to the bench. Their live readings never print — a number frozen onto paper would read as a specification rather than a measurement.

Paper size, scale mode and both frame toggles are remembered between sessions, separately from Drafting's print settings — a schematic wants landscape and a drawing usually doesn't.