Viewports S.O.S.!

[erichardson]

Hi,

 

I was hoping someone could offer advice on setting up viewports in order to print. I understand that a viewport layer must be created to begin with but the steps following this are not clear to me.

Thank you kindly,

Emily

[rkent]

http://www.cadtutor.net/tutorials/autocad/paper-space-exercise.php

[ReMark]

Most users of layouts will recommend setting up a separate layer just for viewports. This layer should be set to not print through the Layer Properties Manager.

 

The other thing most of us do is after we set up the view that we want/need we lock the display so any zooming or panning we do in that viewport afterwards does not mess up the assigned scale.

[nicolas]

1. Once in paper layout, you have to right click on the layout tabs say "Layout1" (by the way to can rename this to suit your needs i.e "GFL Plan", "Elevation A", "Section View" ... you right click and rename) and click on Page Setup Manager. You will have a Page Setup Manager dialog box where you can create a new page setup that you can apply to all the layouts. There you select your name of the printer, page dimension, page orientation, scale (set it to 1:1) and shade plot if you want to do printouts of 3d models.

 

2. Still in paper layout, you create viewport(s) from menu : view >> viewports >>named viewport bringing forth the viewports dialog box. There go to the first tab "New Viewports" select single and press ok. This will bring you back to the paper layout with "Specify first corner of [Fit] " As Fit is already selected for default: you just have to press ENTER. Your viewport is created.

 

3. Double Clicking inside the viewport bring you to the model space. You zoom and pan to the view you want to print by using a combination of mouse drag/scroll. Type in PSPACE or double click outside the viewport when you have finished selecting your view. You can right click on the viewport border, properties and scroll down to scale to change the scale. Sometimes you may need to re-enter the model space to re-adjust the view following scale up or down. Of you do not want the viewport border to be printed, set it to a different layer that is non-printable.

 

Of course, this is but the ABCD of Paper Layout but if can already do that, you can experiment many other things.For example, instead of a single layout, you can have multi layout each one set to a different scale on the same printed sheet. If you are doing 3d, you can have different views (top, isometric, elevation) of the same drawing in the same page.

[qball]

I use Defpoints layer for viewports. Then it doesn't print. In 6 years I have not run into any problems with this method, but I don't believe it's for everybody.