Page "Engineering drawing" Paragraph 67

Even in dealing with 2D drawings, the manufacturing world has changed since the days when people paid attention to the scale ratio claimed on the print, or counted on its accuracy.

In the past, prints were plotted on a plotter to exact scale ratios, and the user could know that a line on the drawing 15mm long corresponded to a 30mm part dimension because the drawing said " 1: 2 " in the " scale " box of the title block.

Today, in the era of ubiquitous desktop printing, where original drawings or scaled prints are often scanned on a scanner and saved as a PDF file, which is then printed at any percent magnification that the user deems handy ( such as " fit to paper size "), users have pretty much given up caring what scale ratio is claimed in the " scale " box of the title block.

Which, under the rule of " do not scale drawing ", never really did that much for them anyway.