hi designnest
It is possible to get excellent construction docs out of layout (depending on your interpretation of construction docs), I do so every week but it is a very, very frustrating experience, mostly down to exceptionally sluggish performance - hardware doesn’t really make a difference, its all relative. To be fair I don’t do any detail or drafting work in layout, most of my details are modelled in the SU model and I expose them with Skalp scenes.
I use Layout for annotations / dimensioning, graphical tweaking in terms of patterns, linework etc.
So I totally get the the pain.
I don’t believe Layout was ever intended to be a drafting / drawing / ‘CAD’ application but as a presentation / communication/ drawing / output layer for SketchUp models and other media, and to some degree it does this exceptionally well.
But
Sketchup Pro (the partnership of Sketchup and Layout) is (now) billed / marketed as an Architectural design tool, even if you can’t read, just looking at the pages of the Sketchup website would indicate that this is primarily a product for Architectural design and drawing output. A significant amount of time is spent annotating, dimensioning, tweaking, and presenting the model in a form applicable to clients, contractors, local authorities, building control etc. This time is spent in Layout and in this sense (in my opinion) it is not up to par - it is sooo slow as soon as anything moderately complex is surfaced through a viewport in vector or hybrid mode, which are the only modes that can represent the detail required at the quality I wish to present it. Things take literally hours and hours longer than they should do. I can pretty much live with the feature set, I’d like a bit more flexibility over layers and masks and transparency, oh and gradients would be nice but I can get my drawings out.
Its also important for users to post views to threads like this one, its an extremely useful conversation/ debate. Poor old Layout doesn’t get too much airtime on the forum as SketchUp is the star of the show so its great to see the actual shopfront for our work get attention.