I have a drawing with a plan of a plot of land. The plan is not to scale. Something that in real life is 20 meters, measures 10 centimeter in the drawing. Since this drawing will be part of a permit request, I need to have measurements and/or calculated area for some of the paths. I need to be able to print the drawing on A3-format.

Now, when I would add the measurements now, I would, obviously end up with the wrong measurements. I tried to fix this, by 1) scaling up the drawing, which obviously makes it hard to print to scale and 2) by changing the scale setting under Document Properties.

The latter is now set to 0,714 (which makes this one reference path 10 centimers). When I change this setting to 142,8 (which would make the reference path 20 meters), the drawing does actually scale, seemingly to real life size. However, I can no longer zoom out to have the entire drawing fit on my screen. The drawing is too big for the window.

So, how should I resolve this? How do I get the plan of this plot to be printed on A3, while at the same time have correct measurements?

Thank you for your help.

I'm running the latest version of Inkscape on the latest version of MacOS.

I'm new to Inkscape (if that wasn't clear right away).

I would not alter the scale settings in document properties.

I would use a standard template for print (in or mm).

To make scale drawings, I'd use the extension RealScale: https://inkscape.org/~Moini/%E2%98%85realscale-resize-by-line-of-known-length

The RealScale extension is an essential tool for this kind of work. In this screenshot I took the unscaled rectangle on the left to yield the scaled rectangle on the right. The Measure tool [m] reports the rectangle width as 120mm (= 3000mm / 25). 

The Measure tool itself has a scale factor. Setting this to 2500% would change the measurement to 3000mm, the real world distance.