Plotting and creating a PDF - Revit Architecture Tutorial

- [Instructor] We've talked an awful lot about printing in this chapter, and now it's time to actually take a look at the Print dialog. First thing you usually want to do decide what you want to print. Now, I should point out that you can print any of the views in your project, doesn't have to be a sheet. But, naturally, we've spent a lot of time setting up sheets in this chapter, and so it's the sheets that I'm going to focus on. Now, usually a pretty good idea to kind of zoom in and just have a look around and make sure that everything is set to your liking. Assuming everything is OK, then you can move on to the Print commands. Now I'm going to go to the File menu here, highlight Print, and then, over here, we have three different commands, and so we'll look at each one of these. We have Print Setup, which allows us to configure our Print options, we have Print Preview, and then, of course, the Print command. Let's start with Print Setup right here. Now, when this displays, the first thing that you want to do is make sure that the printer up here is correct, that this is the printer that you actually want to use. Now, in my case, I'm just printing to PDF. You use the same dialog, the same printing commands to either generate digital prints to PDF or to create a physical plot. What controls the difference is what printer you select. Now I can't change the printer here, so if I wanted to change the printer, I would cancel out of there, go back to the File menu, highlight Print, and then choose the Print dialog, and then I can change the printer I want here. I'm going to leave it set to Print to PDF, and so I can continue with the rest of the settings here. Now, some of the settings are obvious, what's the sheet size, do you want Portrait or Landscape, do you want to Center the print, do you want to Offset it from the corner. All I recommend that you do here is just experiment with the different settings and make sure you're configuring them to your liking. With Vector and Raster Processing, usually Vector is a little bit quicker, but sometimes, certain views, like shaded views, will be forced to use Raster Processing. What I usually do is just leave it set to Vector and if Revit prompts me and tells me I've got to use Raster, I click OK. Now, as far as the Zoom goes, this is how you tell it whether to print at scale or not. Right now, I've got a letter sized piece of paper selected, but I've got an A1 sheet. A1 is much larger than a letter sized sheet of paper. With Fit to page, it'll just make it fit, it'll not be printing to scale. If I change this to Zoom 100 percent, then it will print at full size. In that case, I'd want to come over here and choose a more appropriate size sheet of paper. You definitely want to kind of match up those settings. If you wanted to do a half size set, so maybe I want to print on a Tabloid and change this to 50 percent, that's how you could do a half size set, so a couple different options there. As far as quality goes, I usually print the highest quality that I can, and I'll only dial that back if it's taking too long to print. As far as Colors go, unless you've got a lot of colored objects on screen, you don't really have to worry about it, but it is possible to force everything to Black Lines. What I really want to talk about is these little check boxes down here, because there's a lot of really cool options here. Now, I usually don't use this one, View links in blue, that just simply means that these blue references will actually print in blue. Let me jump over these Hide options and talk about these others. Sometimes your halftone lines don't print so well, so they've got an option here to force those to thin lines. When you're doing masking regions, sometimes the mask actually starts to cover up the thick lines next to it. If you leave this unchecked, then the thick line will always take precedence, so I think it's a good idea to leave that unchecked. Now, we've talked about reference planes before, we've talked about crop boundaries before, and I'm going to talk about unreferenced view tags here in a minute. We didn't talk about scope boxes, that's another kind of utility object. Those three elements, reference plane, scope boxes, and crop boundaries, could be reasonably thought of as the only non-plotting elements in Revit. If you've got those check boxes selected, even though they're displaying on screen, those elements won't print. If you forgot to hide a crop region, you don't have to worry that when you print you're going to get this big rectangle around your view, for example. Just check that box and it will hide them all at print time. But my favorite setting in this entire dialog is this one right here. This is Hide unreferenced view tags. Now, this is a referenced view tag, it says, Sheet 1 and A401. This over here in the Break Room is an unreferenced view tag, it's not filled in. If you uncheck this box, and you click Print, that callout will print, and it will be empty, and then you might get a call from the recipient, saying, "Hey, where's the elevation in the Break Room? "I don't see it." If you check this box, then, that callout will disappear when you click Print. I'm going to check that box, I'm going to click OK, and by the way, over here, you have some Save buttons, so if you do some custom configuration here, and then you want to restore those settings later, you can actually Save it or Save As to create a custom print setup. All right, let's go back to the File menu, and under Print, let's talk about Print Preview. If you want to kind of check things out before you actually commit and click the Print button, Print Preview can be a nice thing to do. Now, it's a little difficult to see because I can only zoom in so close here, but notice that the callout is not displayed in the Break Room, but the section callout in the Floor Plan and large callout are. The other thing you'll notice here is notice these orange lines. If you forget to hide an element that you don't want to print, guess what, it's going to print. Doing a Print Preview is usually a good idea to save you a little bit of grief in printing out a whole set of documents and then having to start over and do them again. I'm going to go ahead and zoom back out here, and then you can click the Print button here if you're satisfied, and move right to the Print dialog. Let's assume that I didn't mind that those orange lines were displaying, and let's continue here. At this point, you've configured your setup, you've decided what you want to print, the only thing that we have to do here is, again, make sure you've chosen the correct printer, I'm doing a PDF, and because I'm doing a PDF, I get two options here. This option is by far the one I use the most frequently. If I'm printing multiple sheets, it will combine all those sheets together into a single PDF that's a multi-page PDF. Now, how do I print multiple sheets? You use this option right here, Selected views and sheets. What this means is, if you've previously checked a bunch of sheets and made a list of sheets, then that entire list of sheets will print at a single time and it will be combined into a single PDF. Otherwise, if you choose this, it'll create a separate PDF for each sheet. I like this, and then when I click OK, I'll get one nice PDF that contains all of the sheets. Now, I'll let you explore these settings further on your own in your own system, and particularly, since you have different plotters than I do, so instead of clicking OK here I'm just simply going to click Cancel to dismiss that dialog. Now, I want to point out one other way that you can create your entire set of documents. If you want to print and keep working, there's a feature that gets installed automatically in the current release of Revit. If I come over here to the Add-ons tab, there's this thing here called Batch Print. Now, this has actually been around for a while, but you previously had to install it manually. Well, now, it installs automatically when you install Revit. If you click the Batch Print, it will give you this dialog that will allow you to expand either your views or your sheets and choose what you want to print. I'm going to check this box and say, give me the whole set. If I click Print here, then it will display this dialog that says it's going to launch another instance of Revit in the background and print in the background. Now, it's warning me here that I might not want to change the project while this is happening, so read through the warning here and heed that, but what's nice about this is you can just sort of select a whole list of views or sheets, send it to Batch Plot, let it do its thing, and walk away from your desk. I'm going to go ahead and just click Cancel here. Those are a couple different alternative ways that you can print a whole bunch of stuff instead of having to do it one view or one sheet at a time. When you're ready to print, those are your options, and take your output either paper or PDF and hand it off to the recipient.