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Software => Tutorials => Topic started by: disisme on March 30, 2006, 12:09:39 PM



Title: Tutorial 5 - printing and posting xtrkcad plans
Post by: disisme on March 30, 2006, 12:09:39 PM
OK, you know how to draw a plan, put elevations etc in, but how do you print it and how do you show people what you've done?

This post is quite long, but at the bottom I will post a step by step sumamry of the 3 things we cover in detail.

Printing and posting are really 2 seperate things, so let me cover printing first.

Xtrkcad has the nice capability to let you print a 1:1 scale version of your drawing.  This means you can print it out, tape the resulting pages to your benchtop, then lay the track directly over the picture.  You'll be surprised just how accurate this is, and you'd also be VERY surprised at just how inaccurate a 'guestimation' is in regards to reality.  It is EXRTEMELY difficult to 'guestimate' the curvature of a track piece, in particular.  While you could measure it, or use set track pieces, laying flex track on a precise radius is extraordinarily difficult to measure.  If you are laying, for example, an 18" radius curve, and your 'center of rotation' position is 1/4 of an inch out, the entire track center line will be so far out you might as well toss it in the bin.  Most curves are there for a reason...to clear something, and that 1/4" will seem like 6" in a lot of places.

There is also a major drawback with laying track directly over the printed output from xtrkcad.  You cant actually permanently mount your roadbed or track to the printout unless you are using pins / tacks etc that will go right through the paper.  Ballasting to the paper is also not such a bright move..... What I do is lay the track over the top of the print out, then pin it to the benchwork.  Once its in place, I then tear the paper out from under the track and draw an outline along the ties each side directly onto the benchwork.  You can then remove the pins and use those lines to center your subroadbed material onto the benchwork directly, followed by your track.  You'll probably still get a little variation if your using flex track, but take the time to get it as close as you can and you'll be good to go.

How do you print this 1:1 copy of the plan? With your plan loaded into Xtrkcad, select File - print.  You'll get a window open up.  The falues for the boxes etc should be as follows :

Print scale - 1
Page width - 7.998 (should be the default)
Height - 10.433 (default, once again)
Page format - Portrait
Print Order - Normal
Engineering data - unchecked
Ignore page margins - unchecked
Print registration marks - unchecked
Print Rulers - checked
Print Roadbed outline - up to you, but I have it unchecked
Width - this applies to roadbed and I;ve never played with it...
Origin - all boxes set to 0.000

You'll notice that the 'Print' button is ghosted.  Theres a reason for this, and it actually took me a while to figure out what it was.  In the background, where your layout is displayed, you will see a whole lot of gridlines displayed over the top of it.  These are actually the paper size and what would appear on each page!  WITHOUT closing that print window, find a place on your layout drawing that you can easily recognise 4 different pages on.  click on those 4 pages to select them.  You'll notice they go to a black background when selected.  Look at the print window... "Print" is no longer ghosted.  Go ahead and print them.  You'll notice that they came out in a specific order...normally top left, then the one below it, then below that, etc then the 2nd from top left, the one below that, etc.  So it prints the pages in columns rather than rows.  Thats a very imporotant point to know, because there will be times shen you dont have a point of reference to work out what page relates to what piece of track.

OK, so you can print it 1:1, but how about printing the layout just to 1 page?  Well, while you COULD do it using the xtrkcad print facility, thats quite a pain in the butt.  You wold have to select every page on the layout picture, then work out what the print scale would need to be and change that..... forget that...lets do it an easier way, which is the same way we get a publishable image for posting.

Close the print window if you still have it open by clicking 'cancel'.

Click on file and select 'print to bitmap'.  You'll get a little window open up.  I only have 'print borders' checked.  You'll also notice that there is a 'dpi' box.  This determines the quality / resolution of the final printed image.  Generally, if printing it, I set this at 10.000.  This shows rails, but not ties.  If you set it to 20.000, it will show the ties when you print it.  Beneath that dpi box you will see the resolution and approximate file size.  Bitmaps are BIG files.  If you have a 10 dpi setting, your file will be something like 4.3Mb for a medium - large layout, depending ont he amount of trackwork etc you have on the plan.  If you change that to 20 dpi the size will QUADRUPLE, not double..... a 16M file is a super fast way to eat up your disk space.  Click "ok".  You should get another warning window pop up saying "you have specified a large Bitmap.  Are you sure you want to continue?"..well, yes we do, so click "Yes".  Yet another window pops up..this time it looks like a save window, right?  Well, a bitmap is actually a file, so its going to print the plan to a file on your disk rather than to your printer.  Dont stress at this point if you want the plan on a piece of paper...this is the best way to do it.... I used to sell cars, so trust me :)  Find a place to save the file....obvioously somewhere that you ocan find it again.  I'd suggest in your my pictures folder (I dont do that, but I tend to print a helluva lot more of these than most mortals).  type in a file name and click 'Save'.

At this point you have a big file on your hard drive that has a nice copy of your track plan in it.  Lets say you called it 'fred'.  Lets get around to putting that whole plan on a single piece of paper.

Start up the Paint program.  If you have another image editing program that you;d rather use, you're on your own for printing it... I'm going to describe how to use a program every Windows member has..... You can find Paint under Start - all programs - accesories - Paint on windoze XP.  On win 98 its Start -programs - accesories - Paint.

Paint is running, so click file - open.  You'll get the window open where you can track down your fred.bmp file.  Go find it and open it.

Wooha....its huge.... Dont sweat.... all will be good.  Since we have the plan open in paint, you can actually draw in stuff like trees, buildings, streams etc.  I suggest you do that while the file is still in bmp format (which it is at the moment) and before you save it again..... Save it again?  Yes... what we're doing here is converting the file from a huge BMP to a nice snazzy little jpg format.  After you've done any drawing you like on this image, select file - save as.  The save window will open.  At the bottom of this window there is a 'file type' drop down window.  Click on the little down arrow thingo, and you will get a list of abvailable file types you can save it as.  Select "JPEG (*.JPG,*.JPEG,*.JPE,*.JFIF)" and click "save".  You will now have a file called fred.jpg on your harddrive.  This file will be about 120k...not 16M.

OK...you have a jpg file of your layout, and this is the point where printing to one page, and posting to a website both start.  Lets finish off printing it first...

Make sure you are looking at the jpg file in paint.  Across the top of the screen it should say 'fred.jpg - Paint'.  Select file - page setup.  A window will open.  What we're interested in here is the "Orientation", "Centering" and "Scaling" sections.  For Orientation you have portrait or landscape.  The rule of thumb here is, if your plan in xtrkcad is higher than it is wide, use portrait, if its wider than it is high, use landscape.  If its square, it doesnt matter.  The centering sectioon should have both horizontal and vertical selected.  The Scaling section should have "Fit to" selected and the number "1" in each box.  This tells Paint to print the plan on a single page, no matter how big it is.  When you click on 'fit to' the boxes will probaly have something other than 1 and 1 in them...make sure you fix that!  Click "OK".  Select - file - print preview.  This will open a window that shows you what your picture will print like.  It should all be on the one piece of paper.  Click 'print' and it will open a window for you to select what printer you want to print it on (I've got 5 printers, so this is useful!).  Select the printer and select "print".  Ticky ticky and whiring noises should start eminating from somehwere in short order.

OK, you know how to print on 1 page, and how to print a 1:1 scale reference for laying track.  How do we show folks our handiwork with the plan image?

The first thing you need to do ois go to the site where you intend to store the picture (NOT this site..we dont allow pictures to be stored here).  Lets say its railimages.  You go to the site, navigate youro way to shere you want the picture to be and upload the jpg file.  I cant really go into details on how to do this, because every place is different.  I use railiamges because it stores pictures at 3 different sizes...a thumbnail, a resized file (which is perfect for forum posts) and a full size one (great for linking too so people can see detail).  Your objective is to have a file that is about  4-500 pixels wide so it appears in a forum nicely without scroll windows.  Of course it can be smaller, but anything above 500 pixels is gonna cause people hassles.

Once you have the picture uploaded and it looks all purdy, right click on the picture and select 'properties'.  A window will open giving you details on the picture.  Lets say you posted it to george.com in the user123 folder.  You'll have to forgive the next bit...I have to put spaces in it to stop it being a hyperlink...read it without the spaces please :)  The "Address" field will say something like the following :
http :// www . george . com/user123/fred.jpg

Highlight that entire file name and hit ctrl-c.  You have copied that filename into your PC's buffer.  Now go off to where you want to put the picture (ie, this site).  Create your post, then find where you want the picture to be displayed.  Again, I have to use {} brackets rather than the 'rea' [] square brackets..substitute the {} for [ and ] as appropriate.  Type the following :
{IMG}
then hit ctrl-v.  It will 'paste' in the file name you copied from your picture site.  So that line should now read as follows :
{IMG}http :// www .george .com/user123/fred.jpg

Now type {/IMG}.  What this does is actually insert program code into the post.  the {IMG} tells the post that this is the start of the address for an image to display and the {/IMG} tells it thats the end of the image address.  Your line should now look like this :
{IMG}http :// www .george .com/user123/fred.jpg{/IMG}

(remember, substitute the parenthesis for square ones)

While your looking at your post, you wont actually SEE the picture.  Submit youor post.  Now when you go and look at it, the picture will be there :)

You got a red X where the picture should be?  That means your address is wrong.  hit the "Modify" button and verify that the entire address between the IMG and /IMG is correct.

You see nothing at all where the picture should be, or just the words for the address?  Click "Modify" and check to make sure you a) used square brackets everywhere, and b) that you have IMG and /IMG at each end of the pictures address.

There you have it.  None of you have an excuse for not entering the competition now...LMAO


Title: Re: Tutorial 5 - printing and posting xtrkcad plans
Post by: disisme on March 30, 2006, 12:25:05 PM
Summary :

Printing 1:1
Load plan into xtrkcad
Select File - Print
Ensure print scale is 1
Slect pages to print off main window
Click Print
Select printer
Print

Print to one page
Load plan into Xtrkcad
Select file - print to bitmap
Set DPI to required size
Select location to save file
Click 'Save'
Close xtrkcad
Start Paint
Load bmp file created in xtrkcad
select file - save as
Set "file type" = JPEG
Click Save
select file - page setup
set orientation
set centering for horizontal and vertical
set scaling as "Fit to 1 x 1 pages"
Save
Select file - Print preview
Ensure whole plan is on 1 page
Click Print

Publish a picture
Start Internet browser
Go to site where picture is to be stored
Upload jpg file created using Paint (as per printing on 1 page above)
Right click on uploaded picture and select "properties"
Highlight filename in "address" field and hit ctrl-C
Take internet browser to site you want to display the picture on
Make your post
Position cursor where you want pic to be displayed
type {img} (use square brackets though)
hit ctrl-V
type {/img} (again, square brackets)
Click "Submit"
look at post to see your image.


Title: Re: Tutorial 5 - printing and posting xtrkcad plans
Post by: mesajim03 on March 31, 2006, 04:17:26 PM
Thanks Dis, I needed this. Maybe You've hit on a new tutorial subject,"How to use this site". I know that I have learned quite a bit from You and the other members and have hopes of learning more. You folks are doing a good job helping new folks to get started in this great hobby and want to express my appreciation,THANKS!! I'm having a lot of fun learning here. ;D


Title: Re: Tutorial 5 - printing and posting xtrkcad plans
Post by: disisme on March 31, 2006, 05:01:43 PM
Actually Jim, I've been very tempted to post EXACTLY such a thread in the new users forum....Do people realise there is a 'read new posts since last visit' link so they dont have to wade through every forum?  do they know how to post a URL link?  Do othey know how to embed a picture in a post?  Do they know WHERE to post?  I'll get around to it one day :)


Title: Re: Tutorial 5 - printing and posting xtrkcad plans
Post by: mesajim03 on April 01, 2006, 02:28:39 PM
I think that's a great Idea. Some of us,Myself included,are just barely computer literate enough to surf the internet but not able to run programs to pretty good. I keep haveing stupidity attacks. :-[ Thanks for all of Your help.


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