Help! Botched another airplane!

**umtutsut** · #1 05-03-2018, 11:22 AM

Gang,

I keep having a problem with building card models of aircraft -- a problem I don't seem to have when building spacecraft and rockets. Maybe someone can tell me what I'm doing wrong.

My latest adventure involves Aaron's BT-1 -- although it's happened with every airplane I've tried to build. I precisely cut out the fuselage sections. I very carefully glued each one, overlapping the edges at the seam rather then using the supplied joining strip.

But when I tried gluing the fuselage sections together using the joining strips, there's a significant circumference mismatch between many of the parts. Some are larger, some smaller...but rarely is there an exact match! I've noticed in the build threads modelers like Pericles and Niki don't have this problem. Their aircraft models look practically seamless!

It's frustrating, because I love Aaron's models but have completed only three -- and those are far from perfect. I don't think it's a matter of "practice makes perfect," because I've been doing this for about nine years, and my rocket models turn out much, much better.

Can anyone help me get un-grumpy???

Thanx,

Les (The Voice of Authority)

**murphyaa** · #2 05-03-2018, 11:30 AM

I'm wondering if possibly you have it set to fit to page. Since the print areas on each page differs, it might be increasing the size of some sheets and shrinking others to fill the page.

**Lex** · #3 05-03-2018, 11:38 AM

I don't quite know the model in question, any photos or inages to help us identify the issue? I lt's not wrong to suspect a fitting issue at times, and dealing with them is an essentiall skill too(!)

**Lex** · #4 05-03-2018, 11:41 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by murphyaa

I'm wondering if possibly you have it set to fit to page. Since the print areas on each page differs, it might be increasing the size of some sheets and shrinking others to fill the page.

Wow is this one of those that has different dimensions between different sheets? Most often they need to be printed to constant dpi, but I also have even stranger ones that needed to be scaled to constant width when printing...

**murphyaa** · #5 05-03-2018, 11:58 AM

Not different dimensions. Everything is done to 200pixel resolution. The space around the edges of the sheets are what I was talking about. If you have Acrobat Reader set to "Fit to Page", it tries to fill those spaces by increasing the size of the printed area.

**umtutsut** · #6 05-03-2018, 12:05 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by murphyaa

Not different dimensions. Everything is done to 200pixel resolution. The space around the edges of the sheets are what I was talking about. If you have Acrobat Reader set to "Fit to Page", it tries to fill those spaces by increasing the size of the printed area.

Hmmmm. You bring up what could be another possible issue. When I do recoloring, I import the page into Gimp at [I]300 dpi[/I] (not 200). Wonder if that could cause a problem when saving as a .pdf?

I'll make sure I uncheck "fit to page," too. Sounds like a total reprint is in order.

Les (The Voice of Authority Who Can't Build Airplanes!)

**Vermin_King** · #7 05-03-2018, 12:50 PM

When I import a model into Gimp at 300 dpi, I always do a page size check ... learned the hard way. I will often open a new page (I have settings to do 8 1/2 X 11 as default), and paste into the new page, just to see if anything went squirrelly.

Okay, not always, and I kick myself when I get to the back end of my work and realize that something went weird. I know to check, and usually do. It's like most things, you rarely have a problem if you double check first.

My guess is that Fit to Page came into play

**cfuruti** · #8 05-03-2018, 02:38 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by umtutsut

I'll make sure I uncheck "fit to page," too. Sounds like a total reprint is in order.

As V_K and murphyaa suggested, a trivial tip - first check if every page has the same pixel dimensions (width and height) and resolution in DPI. If yes, "fit to page" is not the culprit because all pages will be rescaled by the same amount.
Also, since you embed rasters in PDF: PDF pages have a well defined physical size (e.g., inches or centimeters, instead of pixels + resolution); if all pages have the same size, again raster resolution and dimension should be irrelevant, since anything larger than the physical size is automatically cropped when printing - another reason why it's easier dealing with multipage PDFs than with separate raster files like JPG, GIF or PNG.

**umtutsut** · #9 05-03-2018, 04:50 PM

Indulge me one more post, por favor....

Definitely NOT the "Fit" issue, because I forgot to mention I printed the pages at 84 percent to get 1/48 scale. "Fit" is deselected when entering a custom scale for printing. Could downscaling affect parts fit?

I'll note I print some pages directly off the original file, while others I've recolored and saved as .pdf files. Regardless, both show size as 8 1/2 x 11.

Thanks for the comments above. I just want to come up with a good-looking model!

Les (feeling Gimp-y)

**murphyaa** · #10 05-03-2018, 05:03 PM

That might be your issue. Does it only happen with the pages you've modified?

I've noticed that if I import a part done at 300 pix into a 200 pix sheet, it's significantly larger than the same part at 200 pix.

Here's an example just in case I'm not clear enough:

Help! Botched another airplane!-pixel-differences.jpg

All 3 sheets are 7.56" x 10.5". The left one is 200px, the center one is 300px, and the 3rd one is 200px. Both squares are 2 inches by the rulers, and I simply dragged both to the 3rd sheet. Notice how the 300 px square is double the size as the 200px square.

All of my models are done at 200 pixels with 7.56" X 10.5" print margins.

200 pixels is for storage and bandwidth (I found awhile ago that the storage size difference between 300 and 200 pixels adds up across a few hundred 10 page models). The margins was a suggestion by Chip Fyn as a universal size that most printers can print without cutting off parts.