Printing to size in Sketchup

aideym · 6 Oct 2013

I simply have to put up a post on this subject after spending far too much time trying to find an answer to the conundrum that is printing 1:1 in sketchup. The problem has often been mentioned and the answers are at best a bodge job and judging by Sketchup 2013 unless you want to cough up £400 and tie yourself into a £66 a year maintenance contract to get Lay Out then the problem doesn't go away. As 2013 "make" doesn't allow the rather spiffing Boolean plug in I have resorted back to SU8 which for me isn't inferior in anyway to the newer model and has backwards compatibility built into it.

Anyway I digress and please don't think this post a blatant plug for something, which it is, as this is an absolute godsend for woodworkers.
Matthias Wendel has a programme called "Big Print" for sale on his website. I won't put a link it is easy to google if you are interested. This programme takes a design (or photo) correctly calibrates it and then allows you to print out at the correct size. This applies to anything from a few mm across to metres if you desire. It also does proper scaling too. I am absolutely overcome that years of frustration trying to make paper templates from SU has been solved by parting with a few dollars.

Anyway I hope some of you find this as useful as I have. I'm now off to destroy some wood using a finely tuned bandsaw setup by Steve Maskery's excellent DVD classes which is equipped with the most excellent Tuff Saw blades.

Flynnwood · 6 Oct 2013

Thanks for posting that - what an awesome little program!

weekender410 · 6 Oct 2013

xy_mosian did a very nice, free plugin that allows you to print to full size out of SketchUp. He wrote about here in this forum. It's worth taking a look at if you need to print full size patterns. Printing directly out of SketchUp is not difficult at all but it seems many people don't want to learn how to do it. :roll:

aideym · 6 Oct 2013

I best apologise for my inferior skills in SU then. We can't all be talented. I personally found it impossible and frankly an unnecessary load of bollocks

aideym · 6 Oct 2013

I intended to describe a pair of hairy swingers and it was replaced with pineapples

weekender410 · 6 Oct 2013

I like your pineapples anyway.

Well, now you've bought a tool to do what you need, you may not need this but there's a guy in the US who taught me how to print to scale in SketchUp and it's quite easy. He made a tutorial for it, too. He did a thing on xy-mosian's plugin, too. Both work just fine for my needs.

By the way, I wasn't denigrating your SketchUp skills nor even referring to you in my previous comment. No offense was intended.