I have given up on Layout. Whoever is involved with or in charge of developing and releasing it should be fired. I’m sorry, that’s harsh, but LayOut has been too buggy for too long. It is totally useless and has wasted scores of hours of my time.
At first I was excited, as I am an avid Sketchup user and was delighted when LayOut was released. Finally, there would be a program that would facilitate converting the wonderful models into drawings and presentations. I have tried to work several projects in LayOut that I would consider to be of modest scale in terms of file size. I have had nothing but problems and have wasted so much time on what are now completely useless files. Today, I opened one presentation so that I could merely print it out and mark it up before converting it to Revit. When I opened the file it initially looks fine but when I use the print command, the previously perfectly formatted file has take upon itself to change the page size and reformat all the viewports. They are completely unusable with notes and dimensions all over the place and no longer related to the drawings they were attached to. I cannot get a PDF export that is properly formatted. This is garbage. It would take me so many tedious hours to fix it. I am going to have to abandon it entirely and start fresh in Revit.
This is so frustrating and it is irresponsible of Trimble to keep a product on the market that is a time bomb and booby-trapped for it’s customers. My opinion of the company has drastically fallen with this experience. Very sad.
Sorry you had such a frustrating experience. My experience with LayOut has been exactly the opposite. I use LayOut a lot. Four separate LayOut projects delivered this morning and probably four more by the end of the week after I get some final information from the client.
This sounds typical of cases where the scenes for the viewports have been modified in LayOut or the “scene” used for the viewports is the Last saved SketchUp view. Both of those come from incorrect usage.
I hope you find something that works better for you.
Sounds like you’ve had a tough time so far, its unfortunate as you do seem like you actually want to use LayOut. I’ve often seen folk frustrated with LayOut (including myself), but as with any software it must be used in the right way to get the most out of it.
You’ve posted and described your problem, but you haven’t actually asked for help. Your “giving up”. The users on this forum often go out of their way to help others without shunning them for their mistakes along the way. I don’t know how much of a mess your file is in or how much fixing it will take, but I reckon your opinions could certainly be fixed, along with the way you use LayOut.
For that, in my experience, the guy above me (DaveR) is certainly worth a polite approach. Just throwing it out there, its up to you of course.
I don’t quite understand the point of your post. This forum is essentially for users, many of them dedicated and highly experienced long term users of both SU and LO. In the box in which you typed your post, there is a plea to upload files you are having problems with. Sadly, that is frequently ignored, making it very hard for anyone to give useful advice.
As a long term user of SU/LO myself, and a convertee from Autodesk, I have to agree with both @DaveR and @IanT above that it is worth persevering. I do hope you will but if you don’t, best of luck!