Understanding Your Plotter’s Limits

Understanding Your Plotter’s Limits
If you’re familiar with a word-processing or desktop-publishing program, you know that you can set
the margins of a page, thereby telling the program exactly how far from each edge of the paper you
want the text to appear. With AutoCAD, you don’t have that luxury. To accurately place a plot on
your paper, you must know the plotter’s hard clip limits. The hard clip limits are like built-in margins,
beyond which the plotter won’t plot. These limits vary from plotter to plotter (see Figure 8.4).






It’s crucial that you know your printer’s or plotter’s hard clip limits in order to place your drawings
accurately on the sheet. Take some time to study your plotter manual and find out exactly
what these limits are. Then, make a record of them and store it somewhere, in case you or someone
else needs to format a sheet in a special way.
Hard clip limits for printers often depend on the software that drives them. You may need to
consult your printer manual or use the trial-and-error method of plotting several samples to see
how they come out.
After you’ve established the limits of your plotter or printer, you’ll be better equipped to fit your
drawing in those limits. You can then establish some standard drawing limits based on your plotter’s
limits. You’ll also need to know the dimensions of those hard clip limits to define custom sheet
sizes. Although AutoCAD offers standard sheet sizes in the Paper Size button group of the Page
Setup and Plot dialog boxes, these sizes don’t take into account the hard clip limits.