Printing in SOLIDWORKS Electrical Schematic

This article details the different methods of printing documents in a SOLIDWORKS Electrical project and includes some tips for customising the print output.

Printing Projects

To print all documents within a SOLIDWORKS Electrical Schematic project, open the project then use the ribbon toolbar to go to Project > Print (or right-click the project in the side panel and click Print). This dialogue shows a preview on the right of all the documents that will be printed. The list can be customised using the selection filter: under Drawings, select Selection then click the “…” button. Select the combination of books and documents to print using the check boxes in the project tree on the left, then click OK. Refer to the screenshot below.

Printing Books

To print all the documents within a book, right-click the book in the side panel and select Print. This will bring up the project print dialogue as above, with the selection filter already applied to give only documents within that book. Further customisation can be made with the selection filter, as above.

Printing Single Documents

To print a single document, open the document from the document browser in the side panel so that it is showing in the graphic zone. From the ribbon toolbar, select File > Print. Alternatively, the selection filter in the project print dialogue can be used to select a single document.

Exporting PDF Files

As with printing, there are several methods for exporting to PDF. In addition to the above print methods, where PDFCreator can be substituted for a real printer to print to PDF, going to Import/Export > Export PDF Files brings up a dialogue specifically for exporting PDFs. This is essentially the project print dialogue without the ability to select a printer other than PDFCreator and with the Export PDF files option checked on. The path and file name need to be set here. A whole book can be exported as a multi-page PDF by selecting the option Export One PDF File by Book. Please refer to the screenshot below.

Other Settings

There are a couple of other settings to note when printing documents in SWE.

Grayscale: To print in grayscale, enable the Plot with Style option and select the Grayscale.tps style. These tps files control the mapping of colours from SWE to the printer. The Grayscale.tps style simply maps all the colours to shades of gray.

Print Area: When printing a single document, the print area can be selected as Display, Extent or Limits. Display prints the document as it currently appears on the screen, allowing the user to zoom into a particular area to print. Extent prints all the entities defined on the document, including those outside the limits of the title block. Limits only prints those entities within the limits of the title block.