Can I scale the schematic to fit my A-sized landscape border better? It is a small PCB, and the schematic is small in relation to a printed A-sized page. I could scale the PCB Layout from the “PCB Editor” to reduce the printed white space. Is this possible in the “Schematic Editor”?
If not, can this be added to a future release?
Thank you
I am not sure what you mean exactly. You can either “print” or “plot” the schematic. With “Plot” you can also save output to disk in various formats (including pdf and SVG). Printing uses the printer driver from your OS, and thus functionality may vary a bit.
Alternatively, if it is about the relatively wide border around the default sheets, probably the only option is to use the drawing sheet editor to make a custom page layout. I did this a few times, but it’s a nuisance. You have to set it up for each project, and the sheet file itself is (annoyingly) not part of the project, which means KiCad reverts to the default page layout if you for example archive the project and send it to someone else. After a while I mostly just stopped fiddling with this and use the defaults.
Under page settings you can change the paper size of the schematic so that it fits better, smaller for small schematics, for example. The printing system will scale the printout to fit the paper. An A5 schematic will be magnified on A4 paper, but an A3 schematic will be small and cramped on A4 paper, unless you have an A3 printer.
You can even set the paper size for each page of a hierarchical schematic.
Hi paulvdh,
Thanks for responding. The following is a picture annotating what I am looking for.
Thank you
Hi @MothmanSky
As @retiredfeline states: In Schematic Editor, go to File > Page Settings > Paper, Size & choose A5 or smaller from the list.
Check the output with your printer preview.
There is indeed no way to scale the circuit itself, so using a smaller paper size is the only solution. While printing, you can use “fit to page” to make everything bigger.
Thanks for your time and input; I implemented this border using the schematic scaling method.
Meaning: I used a smaller border for the relative schematic size increase when printing to a PDF to fit the A-sized page.
“A smaller border” would be the margin between the paper size and the rectangle on the KiCad sheet. What we meant (and you probably did) was to select an “A5” paper layout sheet.
FYI… You can use the Custom size and enter your desired dimensions.
To help avoid a large layout compressing into a small size, I use a Custom Worksheet 150x150 with custom legend.
Image below shows that 150x150 set to 130x150 to further reduce empty space… Ignore the circuit/other - has nothing to do with size setting’s other than visually seeing it fits into the page…
