Print Settings — Set up print settings and print sets (conceptual)

Historical Context & Motivation

Long before Building Information Modeling (BIM) transformed architectural practice, the act of translating design intent onto paper was governed by mechanical plotters, blueprint machines, and painstakingly calibrated pen weights. Architects and designers depended on enormous flatbed plotters and diazo reproduction systems to produce large-format construction documents, and every setting—from pen thickness to paper feed orientation—required hands-on calibration. The introduction of CAD software in the 1980s shifted this process to digital drivers, but the fundamental challenge remained: ensuring that what appeared on screen matched what emerged from the printer. Autodesk Revit addressed this challenge by embedding print configuration directly within the project file, allowing teams to define, save, and share standardized output settings alongside the model itself.

The central question this lesson addresses is deceptively simple: How do you ensure that a complex, multi-sheet Revit project prints accurately, consistently, and efficiently—whether to PDF for a digital review or to an architectural plotter for a client presentation? The answer lies in understanding two interrelated concepts: print settings (the technical parameters governing each print job) and print sets (the logical groupings of sheets that streamline batch output).

Core Principles & Definitions

Before configuring any print dialog, it is essential to internalize the conceptual vocabulary that Revit uses to describe its publishing pipeline. These terms map directly to options you will encounter in the Print Setup and Print dialogs, and understanding them prevents the most common pitfalls—misaligned margins, clipped views, and inconsistent line weights across a sheet set.

Visual Explanation — The Print Workflow

The diagram below maps the conceptual workflow from a Revit project to finished printed output. Notice that the process forks at two critical decision points: selecting a named print setting (which governs how the output is rendered) and selecting a print set (which governs what gets printed). These two choices converge at the print command, producing either a physical printout or a digital PDF.

This bifurcated structure is what makes Revit's printing system so flexible. You can pair any named print setting with any print set. For example, a single project might contain a setting called Office Plotter – ARCH D and another called PDF – Half Size, while simultaneously maintaining print sets named Full CD Set, Permit Submission, and Client Review – Arch Only. Any setting can be combined with any set at print time, producing a combinatorial matrix of output options without duplicating configuration work.

How Print Settings Work in Revit

While Revit's print pipeline does not involve complex mathematics, it does follow a precise logical mechanism that governs how sheet content maps to physical or digital media. Understanding this mechanism helps you avoid the most common frustrations: cropped title blocks, invisible thin lines, and mismatched scales between screen and paper.

The Print Setup Dialog — Key Parameters

When you open File → Print → Setup in Revit, you encounter a dialog organized into several parameter groups. The Printer dropdown selects the output device or virtual driver (such as Adobe PDF or Microsoft Print to PDF). Once a printer is selected, Revit queries the driver for its supported paper sizes, and these populate the Paper Size dropdown. Orientation—landscape or portrait—can be set to match the title block automatically, which is almost always preferable for mixed-orientation sheet sets.

The Paper Placement group controls zoom behavior. Setting zoom to 100% is critical for construction documents that must be measured with an architectural or engineering scale; "Fit to page" is convenient for review prints but distorts the intended scale. The offset values (X and Y, measured in inches or millimeters) shift the printed image relative to the paper's printable area. Most modern printers have a non-printable margin of 3–6 mm on each edge, and offsets let you center the sheet image within that constraint.

Hidden Print Settings — Appearance Tab

Within the same dialog, the Appearance section exposes the raster, vector, and hybrid processing modes. Vector processing renders all Revit geometry as mathematical paths, producing small file sizes and infinitely scalable output—ideal for line-heavy architectural plans. Raster processing converts the entire view to a pixel grid at a specified DPI (typically 300 or 600), which is necessary when views contain raster images, gradient fills, or realistic rendering overlays. Hybrid mode renders line work as vector and image-based content as raster, offering the best of both worlds at the cost of slightly larger file sizes.

Naming and Saving Print Settings

After configuring all parameters, you click Save As to create a named print setting. This name appears in the Print dialog's dropdown for future use. Named settings are stored inside the .rvt project file, which means they travel with the project when shared among team members—a significant advantage over external plot-style files. It is best practice to include the target device and paper size in the name (e.g., HP T1700 – ARCH D – Vector) so that intent is immediately clear to any team member.

Print Sets — Organizing Sheet Output

A typical Revit project for even a modest building can contain 50 to 200 sheets spanning architectural, structural, mechanical, electrical, and plumbing disciplines. Printing every sheet for every deliverable is wasteful; printing individual sheets one at a time is tedious. Print sets solve this by letting you curate named subsets of the project's sheet list, which can then be batch-printed with a single command.

Creating and Managing Print Sets

To create a print set in Revit, open File → Print and change the print range from "Current Window" or "Visible portion of current window" to Selected Views/Sheets. This opens the View/Sheet Set dialog, where every view and sheet in the project is listed with checkboxes. After selecting the desired sheets, click Save As and provide a descriptive name. The saved set persists in the project file and appears in the dropdown for future print operations.

• Naming convention: Use a prefix that identifies the purpose—e.g., "CD-" for construction documents, "PERMIT-" for permit submissions, "REVIEW-" for internal reviews.
• Updating a set: If sheets are added or removed from the project, reopen the set and re-save it. Revit does not automatically update print sets when sheets change.
• Views vs. Sheets: Print sets can include individual views (plans, sections) as well as sheets. For formal deliverables, always select sheets—they carry title blocks, revision clouds, and proper annotation.

Worked Example — Configuring a Batch Print

Imagine you are part of a design team preparing a residential project for permit review. The project contains 24 sheets, but the building department requires only 10 specific sheets. You need to print these 10 sheets to PDF at half-size (ANSI B / 11 × 17 in.) for digital submission and full-size (ARCH D / 24 × 36 in.) for a physical set. Below is the step-by-step process.

Strengths, Limitations & Comparisons

Revit's approach to print configuration is tightly integrated with the project model, which offers distinct advantages over the external file-based systems used by AutoCAD and other CAD platforms. However, it also carries some constraints worth understanding before you rely on it in a production environment.

Connection to Advanced Publishing Workflows

While this lesson focuses on the conceptual foundations of print settings and print sets, it is important to recognize how these foundations connect to more advanced publishing workflows that you will encounter in professional practice.

Starting with Revit 2022, Autodesk introduced a native Export → PDF command that bypasses the Windows print driver entirely, producing consistently formatted PDFs with automatic file naming based on sheet parameters. This feature builds directly on the print-set concept—you still select a named set of sheets—but eliminates driver-dependent inconsistencies. Understanding the conceptual framework of print settings and print sets is therefore not just historically relevant; it is the foundation upon which Revit's evolving publishing tools continue to be built.

Practice Problems

Lesson Summary