I created a page in Layout and saved it to my Scrapbook and when I copy it back everything looks fine. See the first Image below.
BUT when I export the Layout Document to PDF some extra information is added as shown in the 2nd image.
I checked my original Layout document and exported that to PDF and exactly the same thing happens.
For some reason I’ve deleted the original SketchUp file and no doubt the extra information was in there, but as it wasn’t included in the Layout file I am confused.
I’ve have noticed previously that some of my PDF exports will gain additional geometry like this for no reason and I have no idea why.
Does anybody understand what is happening and what I am doing wrong? I’ve included the Layout document below so it would be interesting to see what happens if somebody else exports it to PDF.
Just a guess, but it might have something to do with all the viewports being embedded instead of having a live reference link to the SU file. Since you’ve deleted your original SU file and don’t seem to need a reference to it, I’d recommend just right clicking and exploding all your viewports, then exporting to PDF.
I see several strange things with your LO and SU files.
As far as that lower viewport for the Left Hand Slider, the scene’s style has Back Edges turned on. When LO renders the viewport during export it’s updating to show that.
It seems to me that if you need to be able to show these parts like this, your best option would be to create scenes showing only the one part instead of the entire window frame. If I were setting this up I would have one iso scene of the component and one scene for the bottom and front view combined.
I made an example for the page you showed. Two copies of the group in the SketchUp model (I’d use a component for this instead of a group) and nothing more. Two scenes; an AXO scene …
A clipping mask was used to hide the upper copy of the group in the AXO scene.
I set the scale for the 2D views larger and split into two viewports separated by break lines to allow the features to be larger on the page. And in the exported PDF it looks like this:
I think having scrapbook objects for these parts could be a good idea for your use case but I would suggest splitting each part into a separate SketchUp model before making the scrapbook if you want to leave them as SketchUp viewports. As it is, your scrapbook items contain a lot of unneeded geometry from the other parts that aren’t shown. Each different scrapbook item you drag in creates a separate SketchUp reference file in the LayOut file. That just adds bloat to the LO file. Admittedly at a little over 2 Mb, your SketchUp model is not huge compared to many but there’s three copies in your LayOut file.
My reduction of the one SketchUp file for the left hand slider reduced the reference file to 35.5 Kb. This not only reduces the LayOut file size but it will also make rendering faster and because you can keep the objects for each of these parts close to the origin you won’t run into the rendering issue referred to be Adam. It wasn’t the case in your example but it could easily have been a problem with the way you have parts of the larger model strung out down the axis.
There are some issues with your SketchUp model that ought to be fixed but that’s off-topic for this thread.
I had no idea there was so much information in a Layout File created using just a few scenes from a SketchUp file and that it all gets included in the scrapbook. It seems as though the entire SketchUp model is in there. I will take your advice and recreate my scrapbook using a much simpler SketchUp model as I tend to redraw that detail on every project.
The really bizarre thing is that if I export from Layout to PDF using an output resolution of Low or High the extra information appears but it doesn’t appear if I set the resolution to Medium? The other workaround that worked was exploding all of the viewports in the scrapbook file as suggested by @nmason
The LayOut file contains a copy of every SketchUp model you insert as well as every image file, spreadsheet, rtf file, etc. Again, every SketchUp-based scrapbook object has it’s own SketchUp file associated with it.
Exploding the viewports on the scrapbook page is one way to reduce things. Make sure you purge the .skp references before you save the scrapbook, though. Before you explode the viewports give some thought about possible future changes to the parts and what making those changes would entail. If might be easier to leave them as SketchUp viewports. Thinking about it further, it also might make sense to not save these as scrapbook objects at all. Just put the .skp files into a folder and insert them as any other .skp file you might use.
Some of my scrapbook items are single viewports from complex SketchUp models and I thought I was being efficient I am going to recreate all of them from there own models which should simplify things a lot.
I still don’t understand how exporting to PDF using medium resolution is also a workaround?
I don’t know what the difference is between export quality settings in your case either but with the model set up as I described it shouldn’t matter which you use. There shouldn’t be any additional geometry to render.
One last question if I may please- in your example above you put a couple of breaks in the door bar to make it clearer. Is there any easy way to do this or do you set up multiple viewports for each view - I’ve often wanted to split a component in Layout but never really knew how?
It is quite simple to do. It’s two viewports side by side. The break lines are a scrapbook item I drew in LayOut years ago. I set up one viewport, copy it, crop it by dragging the edge over as needed. Then paste and drag the opposite side of the pasted viewport to crop this one as needed. Finally, using the cursor keys, I move the viewports closer together.
I am going to recreate all of them from there own models which should simplify things a lot.
