Sheet manager: issuing a drawing set

A scheme is issued as a set of drawings, not one file: a planning layout, a location plan, a landscape drawing. The 🗃 Sheet manager picks the sheets that go out, remembers the selection, and exports them together — each at its own paper size and its own scale. Pro

Opening it

Two ways in, and they open the same thing: 🗃 Sheet manager… in the Export section of the sidebar, and 🗃 Sheets… on the sketch view bar while you are in Sketch mode.

What can be issued

A sheet is a sketch view with a paper size. Only those are listed as issuable — a view with no paper size is shown greyed out, with a note telling you to set one in 🎨 Style…. The Master Sketch View is never issuable; take a copy of it first.

A title block is optional and each row says whether the sheet has one, but a set that leaves the office normally wants one on every sheet.

Drawing groups

Tick the sheets you want and press 💾 Save selection as group to name the set — Planning issue, Client pack, Highways. Pick that group from the dropdown next time and the same sheets are ticked, at the same resolution, without re-reading the list.

• Saving under an existing name updates that group rather than making a second one with the same label.
• Groups belong to the scheme, so they are saved, shared and undone with it.
• If a sheet in a group has since been deleted, the manager ticks what survives and tells you how many it could not find — save the group again to tidy it.

PDF — true to scale

📄 Export PDF writes one PDF with one page per sheet, and each page is that sheet’s own paper size. A set of two A1 sheets and an A3 comes out as two A1 pages and an A3 page, not everything squashed onto one size.

Each page is rendered at the scale the title block reports. Print it at 100% — not “fit to page” — on that paper size and the drawing measures true: scale off it with a rule and the numbers are right.

Resolution sets how finely each page is rendered: 150 dpi for a smaller file, 200 dpi for most issues, 300 dpi for print. An A1 sheet at 300 dpi is a large page — give it a moment.

DXF — for the CAD team

📐 Export DXF writes the scheme for CAD. A DXF has no paper, so it comes out the way CAD wants it: model space, in metres, at 1:1, on the same layers as the ordinary DXF export. The units are declared in the file, so it lands at the right size rather than a thousand times out.

The sheets you ticked are written into the file as a note listing each one’s paper size and scale, so whoever opens it knows what viewport scale to set to reproduce your sheets.

DWG

Not yet. DXF opens in AutoCAD and every other CAD package and carries the same geometry at the same scale, so use that in the meantime.