Fine Control of DWF Printing (Part 1)

There are two popular ways to print a 2D DWF via the Autodesk DWF Viewer: "Fit to page" and "Print to scale." (There is also a less frequently used "Tile Pages.") When using the "Print to scale" option, the Autodesk DWF Viewer does its best to map the "virtual page" inside the DWF file to the physical paper of the printer. Although this works quite well for many situations, there are cases where the margins appearing on the virtual page inside the DWF file are smaller than the margins on the printer. The result is that the data in the DWF file is larger than the printable area of the printer. The side effect is that the image gets clipped, normally on the right side or bottom, so that the print can maintain its scale. Autodesk DWF Viewer 6.5 has a registry entry that allows for finer control over the process of positioning the DWF on the paper with respect to:

• the physical paper (edges of the paper),
• printable region (where the printer can actually print),
• virtual page inside the DWF,
• and the image (geometry in the DWF to be printed).

The registry key is:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Autodesk\DWF Common\Settings
REG_DWORD pplsvpPlacementModifier

The possible values are:

0	=	align the center of the virtual page with the center of the physical page [default].
1	=	align the center of the virtual page with the center of the printable-area of the physical page.
2	=	align lower left corner of the virtual page with the lower left corner of the physical page.

The Autodesk DWF Viewer installer does not create this key by default. You must create it. Autodesk DWF Viewer 6.5 keeps this setting in the registry for several reasons:

1. Most people will be happy with the default and will never need to change this.
2. The User Interface for this would be very complicated. Advanced users understand the relationship between physical paper, printable area, and virtual paper inside a DWF.
3. This setting was implemented in direct response from customers which occurred after the User Interface freeze for the 6.5 product.

To make it easier to set this registry setting, a zip file of available reg files can be downloaded.
Download DWFPaperPlacementRegKeys.zip (1 KB)