Hi guys, apologies for a basic question, I’m new and also behind on work that I’ve promised complete!
I’m basically trying to create zone plans for alarms which is just a 2D floor plan including some doors, walls, stairs and shaded/coloured sections defining floor zones. I’m OK with drawing the shapes and walls my problems encountered have been:
Creating a generic stair icon, colouring then grouping but when dragged over my floor plan loses colour fill?
My text labels float around and change position when zooming I need them fixed for printing to PDF?
Exporting the 2d image to PDF as seen on screen? Does the workspace background colour print?how to change it?
I realise it’s basic stuff, I was quite adept at paint shop pro ten years ago 
Thanks in advance and hopefully come a few months I can showcase mind blowing floor plans with anything up to four colours !
Hi Pete,
Some of your problems are due to using a 3D modeling app to do a 2D drawing task. That’s not to say you can’t do it, but because SketchUp is trying to manage things in 3D you have to take extra care. If you have the Pro version of SketchUp, you might encounter fewer problems using Layout, which is a 2D presentation creation and editing component of the SketchUp Pro package.
For starters, have you selected the parallel projection and a standard view such as top? Drawing 2D while in perspective is a recipe for confusion! Orbiting the view also puts you at risk of creating entities that are off the plane of the rest of the model, which can produce confusing results such as entities vanishing below others when you move them.
If a text label has a leader line, the end of the leader is anchored to a location in the model but the text floats in an effort to keep it parallel to the screen and visible. Text without a leader is anchored to the screen so it doesn’t move or zoom when you manipulate your model. Text works that way because it is trying to position itself in 3D.
Regarding the PDF print of background color, that definitely works on my Mac but I don’t know about Windows - Mac OS X has stronger built-in support for PDF.
Ah, bummer. I get you, I’d changed the perspective as instructed In videos. Yes I have layout I’ll look into it tomorrow thanks for your advice