Plan printing: what to check before you send it

Plans come to us from architects, engineers, builders and people building their own house, and the job is nearly always the same: get the drawing out at the right size, legible, and quickly enough to be useful.

Send a PDF

Send a PDF if you possibly can. A PDF carries the page size, the line weights and the scale inside the file, so what we print is what was drawn. An image exported from a phone or a screenshot of a drawing has none of that, and the first casualty is the thin lines.

Check the sheet size

Check the sheet size before you send it. Most domestic drawings are A1 or A2, and most engineering sets are A0. If the file was set up at A3 and you want it at A1, it can be scaled up, but a drawing scaled up by four is a drawing with fuzzy text, and anything marked to scale is no longer to scale.

Colour or black and white

Black and white is cheaper than colour and is fine for most structural and setting-out work. Colour earns its money where services are layered on top of each other, because following a drainage run across a black and white A0 sheet is nobody idea of a morning.

Laminate anything going on site

If a drawing is going to live on a site rather than in an office, have it laminated. A sheet that spends a fortnight in a van and gets opened on a wet scaffold will not survive otherwise, and reprinting it costs more than the lamination did.

Planning submissions and tender sets usually need several copies bound rather than loose. Tell us the deadline when you send the file, not after, because large format work is the one thing here that genuinely queues.