3.13. Layouts, Viewports and Printing

A drawing is built at full size in model space and presented at a chosen scale on paper through a layout. A layout is a sheet of a definite size — A4, A3, A2, A1, A0 or a custom width and height in millimetres — carrying viewports: rectangular windows onto model space, each with its own centre, scale and rotation.

The tab strip along the bottom of the drawing area holds the Model tab and one tab per layout. Switching tabs switches the canvas: on Model you draw, on a layout you compose the sheet. When a layout tab is active the ribbon grows a Layout tab with the commands below.

3.13.1. Creating and Managing Layouts

Right-click the tab strip, use the Layout ribbon tab (New, Delete, Rename, Page Setup), or run LAYOUT (alias LO):

Option	Action
New	Adds a layout and its tab. Layer definitions are copied from model space, and stay in step with it: a layer added, renamed or recoloured in model space is pushed to every layout on the next tab switch.
Delete	Removes the current layout and everything drawn on it.
Rename	Renames the current layout. The name is what appears on the tab and in the DWG/DXF layout table.
List	Prints the layouts in the drawing to the command line.
Set	Switches to a layout by name.

Layouts are saved in .iqz, and read from and written to DXF and DWG, so a sheet composed here opens as a layout in AutoCAD and vice versa.

3.13.2. Page Setup

File › Print › Page Setup…, the Page Setup button on the Layout ribbon tab, the tab’s right-click menu, or PAGESETUP opens the page setup for the active layout.

Setting	Meaning
Paper size	A0 (841 × 1189 mm), A1 (594 × 841), A2 (420 × 594), A3 (297 × 420), A4 (210 × 297), or Custom with an explicit width and height in millimetres.
Orientation	Portrait or landscape. Landscape swaps the effective width and height of the sheet.
Margins	Non-printable border, in millimetres, on each of the four edges.
Plot style table	The CTB table that maps drawing colours to printed pen colours, widths and screening. See Format Settings.
PSLTSCALE	`1` (the default) normalises linetype dash lengths to paper units, so a dashed line looks the same in every viewport regardless of its scale. `0` scales dashes with model space.

A layout can hold several named page setups — for example one for A3 draft prints and one for A1 final plots. Save the current settings under a name with Save… in the Print dialog and pick it again later; Delete removes one.

3.13.3. Creating Viewports

On a layout tab, MVIEW (alias MV) or the Viewport button on the Layout ribbon tab creates a window onto model space:

Fit (the default) — one viewport filling the printable area of the sheet.
2Points — click two opposite corners to place a viewport of your own size.

The new viewport shows the whole model-space extent. To set what it shows:

Double-click inside the viewport to activate it. The border highlights and the mouse now pans and zooms model space through the window rather than moving the sheet.
Pan and zoom to the view you want.
Double-click outside the viewport to go back to paper space.

Select a viewport (a single click on its border in paper space) to edit it in the Object Inspector: centre, scale, rotation, size, lock and border options are all properties there — see Object Inspector, Viewport Properties.

3.13.4. Scale, Lock and Freeze

Scale is the ratio of paper units to model units. Setting ViewScale to 0.001 on a metre-based drawing gives a 1:1000 plot.
Lock freezes the view. A locked viewport ignores zoom and pan while it is active, which is what stops an accidental scroll from silently changing the plot scale of a finished sheet.
Frozen layers are per viewport: a layer listed there is hidden in that window only, and stays visible everywhere else. This is how one sheet shows contours and the next one shows only the road centreline, from a single model.

3.13.5. Viewport Commands

Command	Alias	Action
`VPCLIP`	—	Clips the viewport to a shape other than its rectangle: Rectangle, Circle, or Polygon (pick the corners). Only the model geometry inside the clip is drawn.
`VPFADE`	`VPF`	Toggles fading of everything outside the active viewport, so the window under edit stands out. Requires an active viewport — double-click into one first.
`VPSCALEBAR`	`VPSB`	Toggles a scale bar drawn along the selected viewport.
`MVSETUP`	`MVS`	Reserved for viewport rotate/scale/title setup. Not implemented in this release — it reports so on the command line. Use the Object Inspector for viewport scale and rotation in the meantime.

3.13.6. Draw Order

Sheet composition often needs one object drawn over another — a hatch behind its linework, a wipeout over a detail, a title block on top. DRAWORDER (alias DR) sets the display order of the selection, with four shorthand commands for the common cases:

Command	Action
`FRONT`	Brings the selected objects to the front of everything.
`BACK`	Sends them behind everything.
`ABOVE`	Places them immediately above a reference object you then pick.
`BELOW`	Places them immediately below a picked reference object.

Draw order is a drawing property: it is saved and restored, and honoured by the screen, the PDF export and the printer alike.

3.13.7. Printing

File › Print › Print…, Ctrl+P, the Print button on the Layout ribbon tab, or PLOT (alias PRINT) opens the Print dialog.

Group	Contents
Layout	Which layout to plot. Model space can be plotted directly too.
Printer/Plotter	The system printer to send the job to.
Paper size	Paper size and Portrait / Landscape.
Plot area	Layout (the sheet as composed), Extents (everything drawn), Window (click Pick Window and drag a box), or Display (what is on screen now).
Plot scale	Fit to paper, or an explicit ratio typed as two numbers (for example `1` : `1000`). Center on page centres the result.
Plot offset	X and Y shift of the plotted area on the paper, in millimetres.
Plot options	Plot lineweights (honour per-object and per-layer widths), Plot with plot styles (apply the CTB table), and Plot stamp (print the file name, date and scale in the margin).
Plot style table	Selects the CTB table, with Edit… opening the plot style editor.
Page setup	Save… stores the current dialog settings on the layout as a named page setup; Delete removes one.
Preview	A live thumbnail of the sheet as it will print.

Print to PDF at the bottom of the dialog writes the same output to a PDF file instead of a printer.

3.13.8. Plotting to PDF

PLOTPDF (alias PDF), File › Print › Export PDF…, or the PDF button on the Layout ribbon exports the active layout to a PDF file at its page setup’s paper size and scale.
PLOTALL, File › Print › PDF All…, or the PDF All button writes every layout in the drawing to one PDF, one page per layout.

The PDF is written by IQcad’s own vector engine, not by a print driver: text stays text, lines stay lines, and the file opens at any zoom without pixellation. Surfaces, survey points, parcels, gradings, culverts, alignments, profile views, point-cloud sections and tunnel sections have dedicated renderers so that styled output matches the screen: an alignment, for example, plots with the centerline, ticks, station labels, arrows, PI markers and PI detail tables its alignment style enables, on the alignment’s component layers, and a profile view plots its grid, profiles, labels, strips and title exactly as the viewport shows them. See Exporting and Importing for the plain PDF Export of model space.