Printing plans from PDF format

Our planning online pages have been designed to give you access to planning application history both past and present. Our online planning section will enable you to monitor the progress of applications, view recommendations and decisions, view application documentation and allow you to submit comments on specific applications online. When printing the documentation relating to Planning applications, it is important that you print plans to the correct scale particularly if you intend on taking measurements.

How do I ensure that printed plans are to scale?

To print plans to the same scale the user intended, you will first need to ensure that the plan is set to 100% in the software you are viewing the file in.

The next step is to ensure you have NOT selected the 'Shrink to Fit' option in the printer set up. If this is checked the entire document will be shrunk to fit the 'printable area' of the paper size you are using. Most printers don't print all the way to the edge so the 'printable area' will be less than the paper area. This allows you to print to any paper size but the resulting scale of the print will vary accordingly (N.B. The 'Shrink to Fit' option is sometimes known as 'Page Scaling' and is often defaulted to 'Fit to Printer Margins' - If this is the case then please ensure that the 'None' option is selected)

Once you have followed the above steps, provided your printer is capable of printing plans at the size received, simply select "Print" from the software you are viewing it in.

To determine the paper-size of the document,you can use a chart from the file available to download in the attachments table below and we have also included a document published by the Planning Portal with advice and guidance on printing PDFs:

Documents

To view these documents you might need to download some software. Visit our downloads page for more information.

	How to determine the size of a document - table showing the measurements of various paper sizes. File format Adobe Acrobat (pdf) - 10.5KB
	Planning Portal guidance on printing PDFs - document published by Planning Portal explaining how to print PDFs to scale. File format Adobe Acrobat (pdf) - 368KB

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