Not sure if this is a wish for a new feature or not

[vistisen]

Does anyone have experience of using ANY rail to print 1:1 lifesize plans using large paper plotters?

I have not yet tried it. (although there is a large A0 plotter at work with endless roll feeder )

But thinking about it, A nice feature would be to be able to put a print overlay on a design, Difficult to explain. but I mean that if for example you could define a bane the width of the paper/printer so that you could drag a semi transparaent representation of the paper onto a design, with the ability to drag it around so as to optimize the placement. A nice feature would be that two adjoining or overlapping banes could have marks on the edges to enable matching so that it would be possible to print the design on to a number of sheets that could then allow a full size mockup of a layout.

[David]

I've never really tried that. If you print on standard paper though, there'll be little markers to show how to tape the sheets together.

We've been thinking of a way to skip empty pages. In many cases that might help a lot. Not in this case probably...

David.

[santerdam]

Did you try to export the AnyRail design to a .jpg and than do all you mention with a photo-editor ? As far as I can see, all you want is available in a good jpg-editor.

Sander

[vistisen]

I'm not sure a jpeg blown up to full size ie several metres in length would look that useable. The resolution would not be good

[santerdam]

For a A0 plotter you don't need 1:1 jpg files. Normally the jpg's are scaled to 1280 dots. The drivers for the plotter later scale up to the 1:1 size, you don't have to do this yourself. Although this is big upscaling, you don't loose accuracy.

Resolution would play a role when you work with photo's of objects, but an "AnyRail line drawing" doesn't need a high resolution. For a trackplan you need the correct dimensions and not a high resolution for every color.

Check the plotter documentation for the best file-format. AnyRail can export in several formats. Possible .png is better than .jpg.

Sander

[vistisen]

Thanks for the advice, I do not know much about plotters, or their softwarescaling. I will at some point have a go on the one at work. As for exporting designs into other programmes. I do this already to draw scenery. But the whole point of being able to do want I want is that it would allow tweeking of designs by seeing them in realsize, and the export/inport/resize process does not encourage a lot of small design alterations that occur in the last stages of finetuning a layout.