Printing the Drawings

[Mike John]

I have a toy car I have designed and I want to give the plans away free in pdf. I printed each part of the car on a separate page from scenes using Sketchup printing to pdf. That gave me 17 pages in total which is fine. I end up with a file about 1mb which is too big for my needs.

I then used Word to assemble the drawings using screen dumps of the drawings and Photoshop and got a much better sized file but the quality is not what I want. How can I produce a file like the pdf attached but better? What software can I use? I can't afford Sketchup Pro just yet. Also, about three of the drawings are full size patterns and this makes it harder for me. Sorry if this has been asked before but I am new and searches failed. Quite frankly I don't know what to search for.

Mike John

[Dave R]

The only applications I know that would really be good for this would cost you more than buying SketchUp pro to get LayOut. And with LayOut it's all pretty easy including the correctly scaled views.

[Jeff Hammond]

I have a toy car I have designed and I want to give the plans away free in pdf. I printed each part of the car on a separate page from scenes using Sketchup printing to pdf. That gave me 17 pages in total which is fine. I end up with a file about 1mb which is too big for my needs.

I then used Word to assemble the drawings using screen dumps of the drawings and Photoshop and got a much better sized file but the quality is not what I want. How can I produce a file like the pdf attached but better? What software can I use? I can't afford Sketchup Pro just yet. Also, about three of the drawings are full size patterns and this makes it harder for me. Sorry if this has been asked before but I am new and searches failed. Quite frankly I don't know what to search for.

Mike John

what do you mean by 'screen dumps' ? if you're referring to a screen shot then this is where your quality problems are coming from..

i think the best thing to try (without spending any $) would be to export from sketchup as 2D jpgs then bring those into word to compile..

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an extra step you could do for even better quality would be to export from sketchup at a larger than necessary size then resize them in photoshop (or other) prior to bringing them into word..

for instance, say you want the final image to be 1000px wide… export them from sketchup at 3000 px wide, with antialiasing turned off, then resize them to 1000px in photoshop..