How to Paginate & Print your design

I noticed a few support requests about printing and pagination yesterday so I thought I’d add a quick note about how to do it here. Hopefully this helps if you want to print out your upverter design.

What other users have done is space things out across the upverter design canvas so that there are groups of components and then blank spaces. These groups are the “pages”. They then mark it with an annotation or a issue, or add a component that looks like a title block. Then they leave a space. And then they start the next “page”. Which is probably how you would do your design anyways, they just do it explicitly.

They print it by downloading our svg format, opening it up in any SVG reader (inkscape or illustrator usually) and select and print each page. This last step adds a little extra work, but really only a couple minutes.

A second option is to heavily use modules and hierarchy, and then just print each module individually as if it were a “sheet”.

All that said, we know for bigger companies that are still working pretty heavily with paper “sheets” and printing are important. So we’ve been doing a bit of work on our side to make it even easier. So expect some improvements from us on this soon too.

Hope that helps!

Thanks @zak, it’s a very useful trick.

In the future releases it would be great to have an “intelligent” PDF export from Upverter. The one that creates proper table of contents (sheets, nets, components etc), preserves properties of each component that a user can view on PDF viewer, have “clickable” net names (cross-probing between sheets) etc

I’ll add it to the list!

Though in regards too all the smart links, etc any reason you couldn’t just share your upverter URL with them in that case? Sounds like what you really want to give them is access to the design and not a printable PDF in that case. Let me know so I fully understand the use case.

Well, most of the companies, especially big ones are very archaic, they’re still afraid of “clouds” :). So having intelligent PDF export would allow promoting UV gradually to them. E.g. if I do a contract design and I the client doesn’t dictate the CAD tool I could use UV and deliver schematic in intelligent PDF and layout in Gerber (ODB++ would be better) to them. That also partially prevents CAD vendor lock-in. Besides IT policy in many companies is to block cloud services. And in parallel I could say “hey, guys, here is a simpler way of data exchange and review, here is a link to this design in UV”.

Overall this would help promoting UV in the industry.

Got it, thanks @cioma!

Hi Zak,
Any update on this? It would be good even if you could drop page outlines on top of a design to allow for easy printing, having it propagate design revision details and auto-numbering pages for example.
Matt

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