Template for the deck

I bought the MDF board and had it cut into 15.75" X 15.75" square. I printed the template on A4 paper, all five sheets and A and B were too short for the board. On A and B is a centerline distance between two drilled holes. It is suppose to be 200MM, (7.874") but it measures 7", (177.8MM). I don't know how to correct this, it is 12.5% too short!

The most likely explanation is that someone or something is scaling your documents as they print. You don't say what software you used to print the templates with, but (for example) the Print dialog of Adobe Reader has a "Page scaling" dropdown and the default is often "Fit to Printer Margins". Set this (or the equivalent in your software) to "None" and print again?

As an additional test, you might try to create a fresh document with a ruler in it, print that, and check whether it is sized correctly in your printed copy.

Also, if you are printing on A4 in an environment where US 8.5x11in "letter" is more common, make sure every piece of the software path from your PC to the printer "knows" you are using A4 -- otherwise something somewhere may try to scale to fit US letter! Check not just the application you print from, but printer driver settings on your PC, printer settings on the server if you print to a shared spooled printer, and on the physical printer device itself.

I just did a test here: I printed each of the 5 PDF files, using Adobe Acrobat 7.0.9 under Windows XP here at work, onto US 8.5in x 11in "letter" paper, making *sure* I had the "Page scaling" set to "None". The resulting paper output (from a Canon copier, if anyone cares!) fits together on my desk, and a ruler shows the 200mm distance as measuring 200mm :-)

So it looks as though the PDFs at [reprap.org] are correctly sized; therefore, there is something about your printing environment that is scaling the output. Maybe just use 8.5 x 11 paper rather than A4, it should work fine for you as it did for me.

Jonathan

Set margins to None! This should be in the instructions. I set it to A4, but didn't eliminate the margins!

I'm glad you have it sorted out!

> This should be in the instructions.

Well, maybe. The instructions already say "Print out on A4 at a scale of 1:1 ..." which is a clear and accurate description of *what* you need to do. Exactly *how* you go about doing that, in every commonly used piece of PDF editor/viewer/printing software on the planet, is a bit harder to write up succinctly

The word "scale" in that sentence should be a pretty large clue that any printing options related to scale or scaling in your chosen software need to be set to either "None" or "1:1" or similar.

I think if we want to add detailed info for multiple PDF printing setups, that should be a separate Wiki page (called PrintingPDFFiles perhaps) which we can link to, rather than making the current AssemblingDarwinMachinery page longer than it already is. If you'd like to make a start on this, testing and writing up instructions for common PDF software on Windows/Linux/Mac, that would be a useful contribution to the project. I expect you'd want to include Acrobat Reader (5.x, 6.x, 7.x and 8.x), Evince, xpdf, GSview, and probably Foxit Reader and maybe CAD-KAS PDF Reader, and then see what other ones people ask about.

[There are probably still a few people out there who will just run pdf2ps and then cat the resulting .ps file to their raw printer device... but they probably already know enough to get things to work right unaided!]

Jonathan

I suppose this was bound to happen with somebody at some point. I'll get the *'s in on the wiki text.

eD