Mirrored Printing

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Mirrored Printing

MartinH
This is my first venture into CAD for engineering, although I have used computers for 50 years and used/dabbled with most things ranging from assembler on PDP10s to WAN setup via database design and business systems and C++ . Once I cottoned on that Copy and Paste was not quite like doing it in Visio I have  found LibreCAD fairly intuitive and well thought out.

I am making a front panel for an instrument designed in LibreCAD. As I don't have access to a CNC mill/drill I was hoping to print the index register for the holes and annotation text on the panel and transfer them in two steps using a heat transfer method, as I have done for PCBs (in DesignSpark).

However there does not seem to be any native method of printing a mirror image, and copying the whole layout, exploding the text and them pasting it back in is fraught with the possibility of errors and omissions. Also the need to explode the text to mirror it alters the original design so it can't be modified later.

I have not succeeded in finding settings for export to PNG/BMP format that preserve the scale correctly, and export to pdf seems the best there is. However it needs then to be imported into commercial software to mirror it. It looks a little odd (the image is cropped to the drawing edge not the full page) but Photoshop Elements seems to do the job.


I was surprised that mirror printing is not supported as it seems a core function for domestic/small users.

So given that its a standard feature in DesignSpark:

1 Am I missing something or is there an easier workflow.

2 How do change requests get logged.
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Re: Mirrored Printing

flywire
I'd start by reading about mirror in the user manual then search the forum for "Mirror" and "CNC" terms.
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Re: Mirrored Printing

dellus
In reply to this post by MartinH
DesignSpark is a program made for designing pcb's, so it makes sense to have the feature to mirror the print out for the method you use.
But a normal CAD program doesn't need this feature.
I recommend to save your unmirrored drawing, then explode the text and mirror the drawing (no need to paste back in), save it under a new name or not at all, and print it.
Alternatively you can edit and mirror a pdf with inkscape, a non commercial program.