Model Builder Community

A question emailed to us over the weekend:
"I received my copy of Model Buider from you on Friday and over the weekend have set up a front wall of British Council Houses measuring 20 cm by 6.4 cm in landscape format.
When I try to print them on my Epson CX 550 printer I can get it to the correct height of 6.4 cm but the width always chops off as if it was in portrait format. It doesn't make any difference if I put the printer into Landscape or portrait mode. If I fiddle with the right hand margin setting it still stops at portrait width but the doors in the wall are out of perspective.
Any suggestions you have would be appreciated.
I have attached a copy of the project for you to see what I have done so far.
Many thanks for the prompt service and also for any advice you may have.
Regards
Graham Highet "

I opened your file and I saw that you used custom paper size. You only need custom paper sizes if you have specialty paper that is not on that standard size list. For example, a paper you buy specially from the office store, or cut up yourself. Otherwise leave paper size set to A4, Letter, or Legal, whatever you have available.

I noticed you had put your right margin at 5.3 inches which explains why the right of your building was getting chopped off. I am not sure why you needed to adjust your page margins. In general you can leave the page margins alone. The default for page margins is .5 inch top/bottom/right/left. Sometimes you might want to print further to the edge of the page. In that case you can adjust the margins lower, down to 0.25 for example. The page limits for smaller margins is determined by your printer model. Some epsons are able to print border-less prints but most printers stop printing around 0.2 inches.

You have a very nice building. With your permission I would like to upload the building to the file share: evandesignsmodelbuilder.com
Also with your permission I will post your question and our answer to the FeedBack and Helpdesk on the evandesignsmodelbuilder.com forum in order to help others.

I re-attached your file with page size and margins adjusted back to defaults. Also in the Tips section of this site we are adding an article about printing. Look for it later today.

"As I am often using Model Builder to make buildings for both my 1:29 indoor layout and also my new On30 layout, many of the structure sizes seem to go off the screen. Is it possible to set up the screen to just print one side at a time and save it as one side at a time? My other thought is to just print out a page of brick, another of doors, another of windows, etc and physically glue them in place on the siding material.
"

Hi

have you tried File>Project Page setup?
In scales HO and larger, there is the option to include up to 4 pages in your project. Choose from portrait or landscape. You can also use legal sized paper. You can turn on or off the pages you need to print from there too.


To see your whole project at once you can zoom out to screen zoom 50%.

Or you can go to Print Preview to see all 4 pages at once. Print Preview is a quick sketch intended to show placement of items among the project pages. It is a low resolution "sketch" and not intended to show final print quality.