Printing Guide
Printing Guide
Printing Guide
Printing Guide
Printing Guide
Printing Guide
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MicroStation lets you create printed output either:
directly to a default system printer, or
via a print saved to disk for later submission to a printer.
In both instances, MicroStation uses a printer driver to either interface with the system printer, or to correctly format the design data for your printer.
MicroStation lets you work with two types of printers, those controlled via the Windows system, and those controlled via a Bentley driver. Typically, in the Print dialog box, when you choose:
Windows Printer — you have access to the functionality of the Windows printer drivers, to plot directly to a system printer.
A Bentley Driver — you can save the print to disc for later submission to a printer.
Printer drivers are stored in MicroStation´s “...\Workspace\system\plotdrv” directory (see Choosing a printer driver).
Where necessary, you can edit a printer driver by choosing File > Edit Printer Driver from the Print dialog box, which opens (by default) Notepad with the printer driver loaded. Where required, you can set a different text editor to be your default. You do this by setting the value of the MicroStation configuration variable MS_PLTFILE_EDITOR to that of your preferred text editor (see Using configuration variables).
Many printers have pre-defined page sizes, which are defined in the printer driver. As a rule, both English and Metric page sizes are provided, with English sizes set as the default. You can edit the printer driver to change the default sizes from English to Metric. This is done by uncommenting the metric sizes (deleting the semi-colon at the beginning of each metric size record) and then adding semi-colons at the beginning of each of the English size records.
While the supplied printer drivers provide commonly used page sizes for each printer, you are not limited to these. MicroStation lets you define an unlimited number of page sizes.
Other options let you rotate the page 90°. As well, you can specify your own custom Width and Height values (see Setting the page size and orientation).
You set the scale for your printed output as a ratio of working units to printer units. When you use the Scale Assistant dialog box, which is opened from the Print dialog box, you can specify the scale as working units to printer units, or printer units to working units. To further simplify setting scales, you can quickly redefine your printer units by choosing Settings > Units, in the Print dialog box, and then choosing your preferred printer units.
When you are printing completed drawings, usually within a border, other scaling factors such as text sizes also should be considered. These factors are discussed in Border considerations.