I am running Kicad Version: 7.0.11-7.0.11~ubuntu22.04.1, release build and I have an imported schematic on A4 paper. I want to print this page on 8.5 x 11 paper.
If I go to File->Page Setup and change the size to US Letter, the schematic does not fit. I tried in the print dialog to set the page size to Letter using the Page Setup button, but all I get is a blank page.
How do I tell Kicad to scale the schematic to fit on an 8.5 x 11 piece of paper?
Thanks!
Hi @pmi
Have you tried the page setup for the printer instead of Kicad?
Click print in Kicad which should take you to the printer. There will be a page setup there and after that select preview to check before printing.
KiCad assumes that you select the paper format you want to print on, but of course that does not work as intended when you find a project somewhere on the 'net.
You can print or plot to a file in either a bitmap, .SVG or .PDF format, and printer drivers for those formats generally have more fine grained scaling options.
My idea is to print to .pdfs. Right now I am aware of 1 or 2 free software utilities for doing that:
Microsoft print to .pdf
pdfgear. MIght work This is a new one which I installed 1-2 weeks ago. At least for some documents, pdfgear is more like Adobe Acrobat in that the .pdf file size is about half of what is produced by Microsoft print to pdf. pdfgear does create .pdfs but it seems that you generally have to open the document with the pdfgear software rather than printing to it.
I also have an older version (9.7.2XXXXX) of Foxit reader which would almost definitely work. Newer versions do not create .pdfs.
Once you produce the .pdf, then you ought to be able to use any of the above (or Acrobat reader but I do not know why you would change software) to print to whatever size paper you want.
XXXXXXXXXX Edit: Try plot to .pdf from KiCad. That gives you a schematic in which you can find text, unlike “print”.
Thank you all for your comments. Let me add some more detail to describe the problem.
I have 7 pages in total in my project/schematic. All pages except page 4 are set as Letter in the File->Page Settings. Only page 4 is A2 and that is the imported schematic.
When I print, pages 1-3 print correctly. Pages 4-7 are blank. Same for creating pdfs - pages 4-7 are blank. A small correction - page 4 has the page outline with the title block shifted to the right on the page (the right border is missing) , but no schematic. Pages 5-7 are totally blank - no borders and no title block.
If I try to print a single page in the range 4-7 from the native print dialog (I am running on Ubuntu), the print dialog goes away and nothing is sent to the printer. I can print pages 1-3 individually from the print dialog.
When I say the schematic on page 4 is imported, I mean I imported the schematic into its own separate KiCad project, and then copied the one part of the schematic I needed and pasted it onto a blank page in my project. It looks OK. The footprints show up in the pcb with all the nets. If I change the schematic it is reflected in the pcb.
I created pages 1,2,3 and 5,6,7 in this KiCad project from a blank page. Only page 4 has imported data.
I might try editing page 4 to fit on a Letter size page to see if that fixes the printing problem.
Thanks!
There is a long waiting issue open on gitlab describing problems with different sized subsheets: Print bug with differently sized subsheets [fix requires wxWidgets 3.1.1] (lp:#1464773) (#1831) · Issues · KiCad / KiCad Source Code / kicad · GitLab
For future references, the workaround solution is to plot to pdf and then print those pages in letter format.