Automatically displaying drawing scales for alternative layout sheet sizes

[Paul King]

We do most of our layouts using A1 sized sheets, but for day to day use (in-house checking, discussions etc), these are typically printed off in A3 hardcopy size.

We have been manually typing the A3 equivalent drawing scales to the A1 drawing scales in our title blocks - but this requires the user to know in advance or keep coming back to manually check all the drawings at different scales that will ever be placed on that layout.

It should be a very simple process to automate this - for A1 printed out at A3 size, you just take the figure from autotext result for the <drawingscale> property and double it.

How do people automate their drawing scale figures in layout title blocks to include the drawing scales applying when printing our at other sheet sizes?

Surely this has been successfully addressed somewhere by now?

Without exception, all practices I freelance to have this requirement, so have some confidence that this is not an 'edge case' that GS can safely ignore.

Operating system used: Windows 11 25 H2

[Kevin Lee]

@Paul King 

Yes! A1(for issue) to A3 (print) is a common workflow for us too. I've been exploring different ways to automate this in our office, but haven’t yet found the best solution—mainly because GDL has limitations when it comes to editing auto text. (I was hoping to read the master layout name and use that to control paper sizes, but that hasn’t worked out so far.)

As an alternative, I’ve been using the drawing title to control the scale. I’ve set it up so the drawing title reads the live drawing scale (e.g., A1) and then displays the “A3 equivalent drawing scale.” It’s not perfect, but since most of our drawings are created in A1 and printed in A3, it gets the job done.

It would be great if I could find a way to access master layout details directly—then the solution could work across any paper size!

[Paul King]

A messy problem with any manual system like that is when you have several drawings on one layout, all to different scales.

I guess you could have a 'small' scale conversion table included on your master layout title block, listing all the likely scales in the project relating each native A1 scale to the A3 equivalent scale - but this is very unwieldy!

[Erwin Edel]

Maybe you could add something to the publisher scheme and make two publisher sets (A1 and A3). I've added custom fields to the publishing scheme for filenames. I'm not sure you could reference them as autotext on your title block though.

That would only fix sheet size though, I'm not sure if you can re-calculate drawing scale based off your printing scale.