With FredoLayport, you can see the corresponding rectangular area in Sketchup (red rectangle, precisely called a Layport). This helps to better configure the cameras of scenes in Sketchup and avoid having to change the camera in Layout.
Fredo Layport also includes a command to center objects on the layport with some margins (green rectangle) as well as a Quick Print.
Here is a quick overview on FredoLayport.
As I am not myself a designer or an architect, I would appreciate if there would be some kind beta-testers interested in evaluating the extension and making comments and suggestions. Thanks in advance.
looks interesting - one thing to note: the scale setting in the scene, if it’s not set going into LO, then setting the LO model scale on the viewport will change things (not (?) in the 3D view but definitely in the 2D perspective). so the ability to set scale like 1:20 or 1’ = 1/4" etc would be immensely helpful in moving from SU to LO and keeping the views aligned.
@Fredo6 I agree with @glennmstanton . The most important parameter to control in LayOut is the printed scale of the drawing.
I have different pages in my Layout template with different scales in order to use the one which fits best with my model.
Layport to scale is possible. It just requires to set the page dimensions for printing.
I note however that Layout assumes there is only a SINGLE page format for the whole document (.e. all pages must for instance A4 Portrait, or A3 Landscape and you cannot mix page format in the same document).
I have integrated a Print to Scale function for scenes (when in Parallel projection).
So, you can assign a scale to each scene individually (you may not need a layport, but if you have one, you can center the 2D view in addition).
In the following model, I have 2 scenes of a cube of 1m size. I have assigned a scale of 1/10 for the first scene and 1/20 for the second scene. Here is the output in Layout.
HOWEVER, I noticed, at least on my own printers that the physical printout can be slightly smaller, because the printer would scale down a liitle bit and leave margins around the print area.
For instance, with my Laser printer Brother MFC-L3750, the print area is smaller by 1 cm in height and width (this seems to a physical settings, as I did not find an option to change that). For instance, the size of the cubes is only 9.7 cm when measured on the physical paper, where it should be 10cm.
On a regular Canon Inkjet, this is fine: the printer seems to use the whole page as the print area.
Is this an issue you encounter?
If so, I can easily add a paper correction factor by printer to rectify the scale-down of the print area versus paper page.
The check “Sin márgenes” means no margins and Expansion is set to max.
The warnign says…
The print quality in the upper and lower areas may decrease or the area may be smeared depending on the media type.
Selecting Min or Medium in the Expansion setting will reduce the image magnification. However, you will see a white border around the printed image.
You have the same problem with different softwares. Whith Revit you should take care of it too.
I would only be concerned if converting to pdf results in such an error. (My personal opinion…)
The fourth button, Center Selection (or model) on Layport - whichever way i tried, it ignores text labels (and maybe also for record selection - this one I didn’t try).
So i have gone back to Mc View Size, which allows me to resize the viewport to fixed predefined dimensions (even for SU 2024.!), although your extension is much better, and does many other things…!
Also, if you fix that, it would be better if it can be implemented an Alt mode for orbiting too (with middle scroll press too.!), with auto-update of the scene, this way the scene process would be completely automated by simply pressing Alt; this only if the API’s allows it.
Believe that if it was technically possible, I would have done it. Unfortunately, the API does not give access to the position and dimension of the text label; it only provides the anchor point. Worse, for a text label without a leader, there is simply no geometry information.
Well this is only Trimble’s fault, because it is not impossible.
You know, if you export out of SU in DXF or DWG format and open that file in Corel or AutoCAD, all the text and dimensions become geometry. I haven’t tried to open the same file in SU again, but I will, and if again everything is geometry… then I’m 100 percent right - it is not impossible, they just have to provide more API’s…
Thanks for all your efforts.!
Well, i tried a workaround, by putting the text inside of a group with one or more objects (in the hope that if Layport doesn’t see the text it will at least see the bounds of the bounding box) - it doesn’t work…!!
It doesn’t matter, it wouldn’t work anyway, because there is something even funnier - Sketchup doesn’t include the text in the bounding box, but only the leader arrow…
There’s no solution for this one, as any printer has its own margins, predefined from factory, and can not be changed - there’s no one rule that fits them all, you have to test what works for your own printer…
Edit: even if you have the option “no margins”, the printer still keeps a minimum margin for itself.
Man, i can’t describe how amazing this tool is.!
I don’t understand how nobody made a tutorial about it so far (except you of course).!
I don’t use it for Layout, because I don’t use Layout at all - it is much too buggy and laggy, but worse is the fact that the quality output is mediocre, I use a dedicated publishing software and the quality output is way beyond Layout, maybe in print… is not so evident, but for digital output… no comparison.
Maybe you made it for Layout… but this extension has so many useful tools in it.!
Thanks.!
Edit: Sometimes CTRL+Z works only once (I haven’t figured out when and why it happens, probably mostly in ALT mode movements and in centering.!), when this happens it also breaks the CTRL+Z chain, and so you will lose all the previous steps you may have made inside SU.
Can someone help explain why the Layport Menu isn’t loading correctly for me? The buttons are not displaying. I am as current as I can be with SU and the plugins.
