How to Scale and Export a Map in AutoCAD

Written by Tom Samuels on

Struggling to scale and export a CAD map in AutoCAD? Here, an architect takes you through each step. Hope you find it useful.

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VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

''Hello, today I'm going to be showing you how to take your map and put it onto a sheet, scale the sheet and export it in AutoCAD. So the first thing we want to do is to just check our units and that our map is to scale and to do that we're going to go to 'drawing utilities', then 'units' where we can see we're working in millimeters which is great, so click OK there and then we're just going to check the maps to scale by measuring our bar and that's now showing us a 100 meters in millimeters. So then to put this onto a sheet we're going to create the sheet here where it says 'new layout' and it's automatically then called that layout 2 - if we double click on that text we can name that sheet A3 and I'm just going to remove this for now. So although that is named A3 it is not actually A3 and to change that we go to the 'page setup' manager by right-clicking and here we see our our layouts which we're going to modify we're going to put our print driver to PDF and here you can see we're currently working in an A4 sheet, which we want to change to A3 and as you can see there's the 420 x 297 is now updated and the next important thing is the scale, where we want one millimeter to represent 1250 to 1:1250 scale which is very common for maps. Click 'OK' and there we have our maps pasted up. To drop our map in we're going to click 'viewports' and click 'OK' at this box and now we place our box as so, and as you can see we've now dropped in our map into onto the paper space and this is demonstrated by this here where you have a model or paper space. So at paper space you can now change the extents of how that map would sit on the page, whereas if you click within that you're they're back in the model space where it acts as it did previously at this model tab here and this allows us to zoom and pan. As you see as you zoom scale was changing but because we've set the page up to scale by clicking one to one we then are at a 1:1250 scale at A3 and we can then pan that to say, show our site in the middle. By clicking on the grey, double-click, we then revert back to the paper space. So let's say we want to put in a scale bar we repeat that process again by clicking view ports we would then draw a box as so and as you see it dropped back in another map by clicking in that we can then again change that scale which we're going to want at 1 to 1 to be the same as above and they will just pan that to show the the information what a show which in this case is a scale bar so we wanted to say that text is too large we could crop that down and add our own text to the sheet and then just to demonstrate how this would work if we say wanted to change our scale but going to modify and say we want a 1:500 map as you can see it's then made the map far larger and we would then have to be editing that paper viewport to then fill our page as we would want and then you'd have your your 1:500 map some other editing of course so just to go back then to our 1:1250 map by undoing we will then export this map which is pretty simple you go up to the top where you have export and you can then choose to explore that as a PDF where it will give you a dialog to save that where you wish or you can print it plot it but it will take you through your plot settings in order to pin that map out and that's it that's how you bring a map in to a paper space and scale it and export it, thank you very much.''

Written by Tom Dawson