Exporting to scale is a 100% vital function for sketchup. I need to be able to send a scale plan sketch directly to a printer or attach to an email within seconds, not minutes, like I can with any other architectural design software.
Layout is a completely unnecessary extra step that adds time to every export, creates unnecessary additional files, and frankly cannot adequately handle the size models many of us work on.
No matter how many bells and whistles are added I can not see doing any significant amount of layout in layout.
I can’t express just how irritated I am with this loss of functionality and how much wasted time it will add to my workflow.
print to scale or export to scale? as in e,g, 1/4" = 1ft scale? or 1:20 scale? because the challenge with printing is it’s dependent on the page size and fill ratio. when exporting, you export real models (typically) and those are to whatever scale you set them to.
Print - we need WYSIWYG printing to scale. The exact same function every version had until this one. I need to be able to rapidly print a scale rough sketch as it appears on my screen for a whole number of uses but especially mid-meeting to mark-up plan sketches that include a combo of vector and raster info (such as site lines layered on geolocation raster). I used that function multiple times a day and doing it in layout adds 10-30 minutes every time.
Export would work adequately if it included the raster and shadow. It would be ideal to have the vector/raster combo as a printing option from sketchup but I gave up on that wish years ago.
I don’t want to have to use layout at all. it is not pro-grade software and is not nearly full featured enough to have any other use in my workflow beyond what I am now forced to do to export simple scale plans and elevations.
It seems 2024 has not restored this functionality of being able to print, so it is likely never to return and we are to be funneled over to Layout.
A simple solution for using the “Export” to PDF, rather than printing, could be to generate the PDF as an image rather than vector content, but SketchUp currently does not give this option.
When importing a PDF into other software, the white space around a model will be blank paper behind the vector PDF content, so hopefully you can get other software (like Photoshop) to recognize the media frame rather than just the vector content frame. To get the PDF vector content to match the dimensions of a raster image exported from the same scene, make sure there is content that extends beyond the view frame of the viewport/canvas area. This way, whatever vector content is in the PDF will extend to the same frame as the raster image, so you can again use a vector PDF export (instead of a raster PDF print) as a guide to define the size of an image exported from your scenes.
It may still be unfortunate that complex models can take some time to export. Turn off as much content (layers/tags, edges) as possible before exporting the PDF, and it should go faster.
