Google SketchUp® 7 For Dummies®

Chapter 12. Printing Your Work

In This Chapter

• Printing views of your model

• Figuring out the printing dialog boxes

• Printing to scale

As much as everyone likes to pretend that we all live in an all-digital world, the ugly truth is that we don't. People use more paper now than they ever have; I have a stack of junk prints on the coffee table in front of me as I'm writing this. It's not that I have anything against trees — it's just that printing is so satisfying. I love having something I can fold up and put in my pocket, or stick to the fridge, or mail to my Luddite relatives. Computer screens are nice, but in most people's minds, paper is real.

In this chapter I talk about how to print views of your SketchUp model. Because the Windows and Mac versions of this procedure are so different, I dedicate a whole section to each platform. The last part of this chapter is devoted to scaled printing — a topic that can sometimes make experienced architects nervous. SketchUp makes printing to scale a little harder than it could be, but it's still a whole lot better than drawing things by hand.

Tip

If you're using the Pro version of SketchUp, you can always use LayOut to print views of your models. LayOut makes it a lot easier to make both scaled and non-scaled prints; take a look at the last part of Chapter 14 for all the juicy details.

Printing from a Windows Computer

It's very easy to print from SketchUp, as long as you're not trying to do anything too complicated. By complicated, I mean printing ...