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I’ve taught and demonstrated SketchUp for several years now, and I’ve seen beginners make the same mistakes again and again. Here are the most common slip-ups and my advice for avoiding them.

Printing full-size patterns is easier than you think. The instructions below are for Adobe Acrobat Reader (download for free here), but the basics are the same for just about any program.

•  Open the PDF in Acrobat. It’s easier if you download and save the PDF to your desktop and print from there, rather than printing from your browser.
• Choose File > Print.
• Under Page Scaling – or Page Sizing & Handling – (near center left of Print box), choose Tile All Pages – or Poster. NOTE: the preview image will show you how the document will look once printed, how many pages it will print on, etc.
• (Optional) Set any of these options, referring to the Preview image to check the output results:
• Tile Scale: This affects how close to actual size the image will print. Recommend: 100%.
• Overlap: Specifies the minimum amount of duplicated information you want printed on each tile for ease in assembly. Recommend: Leave as is.
• Labels: (not necessary) Includes the PDF name, date of printing, and tile coordinate on every sheet. For example, Page 1 (1,1) means row 1, column 1 of the first page. Tile coordinates are used for reassembling the tiles.
• Cut Marks: Prints marks on each corner of a tiled page for ease of assembly. Use this option in conjunction with the Overlap option. When you specify an overlapping edge and then superimpose those edges, you can use the cut marks to line up the tiles.
• Once you have your desired settings, Click OK or Print.