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Tutorials:

View & Print these drawings in:

Rhino

ProgeCAD LT

Free CAD drawing Viewer
All you need to view and print any drawing on this site with step by step instructions

View & print DWG plans of the Wellington State Opera House. Once the drawing is loaded into the cad program, check the scale, choose which layers you are interested in, and print the drawing at a relevant scale as follows:

1] Download & install Rhino - www.rhino3d.com

2] Download the file operahse.dwg from this site.

3] Start Rhino and From File / Open choose "AutoCAD DWG (*DWG)" from the drop down box "files of type", and then navigate to the folder where you downloaded the oprahse file to, and open file "operahse.dwg"

4] Once the file is imported, double-click on the word "Top" on the top viewport to maximise it, then click the "zoom extents" icon - (the one that looks like a magnifying glass with an arrow at each corner) to zoom out so you can see the whole drawing.

5] If you have a wheelmouse, centre the cursor over the scale info at the bottom of the drawing, and roll the wheel forward to zoom in on it until you can comfortably read the first 5 metres of the scale.
Alternatively, from the menu bar choose View / zoom / window, and then move the cursor to the lower right side of the drawing and click once to create an anchor point, then, still holding down the mouse button down, move the mouse so a selection rectangle encloses the area that is to be enlarged and then release the button. The drawing will enlarge to that area. If you mess up, just press the home key to zoom back to where you were and try again.

Muck about with the above a bit until you get the hang of it - the icons at the left top of the toolbar like a magnifying glass can also be used - resting the mouse over any of them pops up a tooltip explaining what it does.

Eventually, zoom window into the part of the drawing at the bottom that shows the scale - in fact zoom into the scale so you can see the first 5 metres comfortably.

6] Choose Tools / Options and then units from the dialog box, and set the model units to mm from the drop down box.

7] Click on the word "osnap" on the status bar at the bottom of the screen, and make sure "end" is checked in the dialog box that pops up - other snaps can be left unchecked.

8] Choose Analyse / distance, and then move the cursor over the top of the first division of the ruler above 0. The cursor will snap to the end of the line representing the beginning of the ruler - click once and then move the cursor to a similar position above the 5, and click again when the cursor snaps to the end of the line.
The command line at the top of the screen reports: "Distance = 5000.0000 millimetres" Since this confirms what the scale reads, we know that the drawing is properly scaled. You could now accurately measure any other series of points on the drawing if you wanted - pressing the space bar, enter or the right mouse button repeats the last command - in this case "distance".

9] Zoom extents, (View / zoom /extents) then Edit / Layers / edit layer  to bring up the layer control dialog.
Here you can see what the various layers are that make up the drawing, plus what they are called, whether they are on or off, etc. You can also change any of this from this dialog.. Uncheck any layer to turn it off, etc.

For now, sort the layers in alphabetical order by clicking on the "name" title. Then click the icon on the layer dialog that looks like a hammer and from the pop-up choose "all layers" to select all layers, and then click on any light bulb icon to every layer off.

Click on any layer name to unselect everything, then check the following layers on (by clicking the light bulb icon so that it is "lit": L-Stage, L-Aud, L-SR,  Also click to the left of the name L-Stage to set this layer as the current layer.
Close the layer dialog, then zoom extents. This shows us just a long section of the auditorium & stage, plus details of features on the stage right wall.

10] Print the drawing at a scale of 1:200 - Choose File / print . Set the printer paper to A4 landscape.
Set the printer output to "Vector", the output color to "black and white".

In the "View and Output Scale" area, check the following:
view = top; extents; 1:200 from the drop down box under scale

The print preview will update to reflect these changes - print it if you want. Carry out similar operations to print other parts of the drawing at various scales and, depending on your printer, on various other sizes of paper.