Generating a multiple page 11x17 PDF from drawings in QCAD

During the course of my job, I've been generating a lot of technical drawings for various parts that I need in the lab. One such part was a panel on which to mount a bunch of valves to handle the various process gasses we need for our experiments, so I laid out the drawing using QCAD. In order to have this panel fabricated by Pittsburgh Valve and Fitting, I decided to generate an 11x17 PDF with several pages so that it would be clear what I wanted. Making this multiple page PDF was non-trivial. From QCAD, one can only print postscript files. Here's what I did to get what I wanted.

1. Select 11x17 paper size in QCAD for my drawing.


2. Use print preview to line up and scale the drawing on the page.


3. Export the drawing as a postscript file. I exported one .ps file for each page in my PDF. Now I have a bunch of postscript files laying around my filesystem named 1.ps, 2.ps, and 3.ps.


4. Use ps2pdf with some options to generate individual pdfs of each page. I found a very helpful post on a blog called The Open Access Peon.
   
   I executed essentially the following commands a few times:
   
   $ identify 1.ps

1.ps PS 791x1223 791x1223+0+0 DirectClass 16-bit 52.9277kb

$ ps2pdf -dDEVICEWIDTHPOINTS=791 -dDEVICEHEIGHTPOINTS=1223 1.ps
   
   That last command gave me the following PDFs: 1.pdf, 2.pdf, 3.pdf)
   
   
5. Use pdftk to cat all the resultant PDFs together:
   
   $ pdftk 1.pdf 2.pdf 3.pdf cat output schematic.pdf
   
   Result: schematic.pdf



6. Rotate the pages of the result 90 degrees CW:
   
   $ pdftk schematic.pdf cat 1-endE output schematicnew.pdf
   
   Result: schematicnew.pdf
   
   

I'm pretty sure those last pdftk commands could be collected together, but that exercise is left to the reader.

Ultimately, one could develop a workflow with scripts that would build a PDF document from a dxf file using QCAD.

It should be noted that the panel we are going to wind up with is fairly different than the example given in this post.