I am relatively new to Sketchup and Layout and maybe missing something obvious.
Is it possible to have landscape and portrait pages in the same Layout drawing? To clarify further, I want to be able to select the aspect of each page individually. i.e. page 2 in portrait and page in landscape.
My reason for wanting to do this is that I have a layout drawing of components from a woodworking project, and some parts are vertical (legs), and some are horizontal (stretchers).
I am trying to use the standard views in the viewport and avoid having copies of the component in the model or create scenes that are not one of the standard views.
I’ve encountered the same problem, which I solve in one of the following ways:
I create two files, one for the Portrait, the other for the Landscape orientation. This is only valid if the pages need to be printed and their order does not matter.
If I need to keep the page sequence (including page numbering), in the portrait file I create a landscape working area placeholder for the pages I need. When I am done, I group all the drawings on these pages and rotate them 90 degrees. If I create a pdf file, I rotate the pages in Adobe Acrobat, if I just print, the direction doesn’t matter.
Worse if one project requires different size pages (A3 and A4). Multiple files must be created and AutoText cannot be used for page numbering.
That is not universal enough and I hope that some improvements are expected in the future.
I often have to deal with the long parts thing in woodworking plans I make in SketchUp and LayOut. I usually leave the components in their normal orientation in the SU model for the standard view scene and if needed, I will rotate the viewport in LO. I know others have requested the option to have both page orientation options in a single document before and it has its place. My preference for the plans I make is to have the same page orientation for all pages, though. It makes it easier for the viewer to use them.
One thing you might also consider is that you can dimension across viewports in LO so you can split long components.
Here are some views from a recent project.
And exploded view:
Thanks DaveR,
Great reply, full of useful suggestions.
The view port rotate solves the problem. Another new thing I learnt.
I can really make use of several of the other suggestions you have shared.
How do you get the break lines in a part? Is it two viewports or one split?
The exploded view is also something I want to do. Is this a scene? Does the scene remember where the parts are in space.
When I need to make something like this I set up one viewport where I want it, set the scale in the SketchUp Model panel to suit. Then I copy the viewport. I drag the edge of the viewport where I want it to crop off the view of the model. Then I paste the copy and drag its edge to make the crop for it. After that I add the break lines.
It is a scene in the SU model but it is of a copy of the model. Scenes don’t remember where the components are. If you move a component it will appear to be moved in all scenes in which it appears. Instead, I make a copy of the assembled model and move it to the right and back a bit for the exploded view. Here’s a view of the overall model space in the magazine stand project.
One thing to note here. The general teaching is to make groups of things unless there’ll be more than one in the model. Since there’s only one top, one front stretcher, and one rear stretcher in the magazine stand, some people would teach making those groups instead of components. Thinking ahead to creating the plan, however, you can see there are two instances of the top and three of both front and back stretchers. So every part in the model is a component from the beginning.
