Scaling of viewport

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johan162
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Scaling of viewport

Post by johan162 » Mon Jul 09, 2018 9:10 pm

The new feature of Viewports (in the pro-version) is really a nice thing but the way it works is a bit surprising when it comes to scaling and I think an option to make it work in, for me, a more logical way would be nice.

The problem as I see is that the scaling applies only to the content of the viewport and not the border layer of the viewport creates some surprises.

If, you have a large drawing (in model space), say architectural drawing, and create a viewport from a part of this model it needs to be scaled down. The way viewport works now is that you create the viewport, the viewport gets placed on the paper but it is not yet possible to apply a scale. For this you first have to place it on the paper (click). The you can select the viewport again and edit the properties to get the proper scale of the content of the viewport.

However, the bounding box for the viewport does not scale along the part you have placed in the viewport from the model space. After scaling the part appropriate you then have to "manually" shrink the viewport bounding box in order to achieve the necessary clipping you defined when creating the viewport in the model space. Since in an architectural drawing the viewport will normally be many times the paper size and initially I thought it was a bug since when I scaled the viewport much more of the original model was visible (even outside what I had clipped it to) since I didn't immediate realize that the clipping viewport was way, way outside the actual paper layout.

Suggestion:
When doing the scaling the viewport should, by default, follow that scaling. This would then create the same appearance (with the same clipping) as the one originally defined when the viewport was created. It could be a checkbox in the property to allow separate scaling of viewport and content.

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andrew
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Re: Scaling of viewport

Post by andrew » Mon Jul 09, 2018 9:24 pm

johan162 wrote:
Mon Jul 09, 2018 9:10 pm
The way viewport works now is that you create the viewport, the viewport gets placed on the paper but it is not yet possible to apply a scale.
You can in fact adjust the scale in the options toolbar at the top at this stage (and indeed you would typically want to do that, as the scale of a drawing part is usually known in advance). At this stage, the border of the viewport also scales together with its contents which I believe is what you were looking for.

Editing the scale in the property editor would be rather unusual if at all necessary (you'd probably better create a new viewport from scratch if you need a different scale).

Once the viewport is created, it "lives" in paper space and its boundary should not be affected by the scale of its contents. The viewport rectangle typically takes up as much space as is available within the drawing paper / border. Scaling the viewport boundary at this point would very likely have an undesirable effect.. Having said that, you can still resize the viewport boundary by dragging its corners.

johan162
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Re: Scaling of viewport

Post by johan162 » Mon Jul 09, 2018 10:08 pm

Yes I tried that but I must have misunderstood something since it doesn't really work in the following case:

1. For some reason the only pre-populated scaling in the drop down is 1:1 (you can of course manually change the paper scale to, say 1:20) but it is not readily available since this is the paper scale 1:1. However, after you placed the viewport on the paper the drop down scale populates with a long list of scales.

2. Since it is a paper scaling it applies to all objects on the paper (not just the viewport you are trying to place). So for example, I have an A3 drawing template (title, change note etc.) placed on the paper layout, if I try to place the viewport, change the paper scale before clicking to really put the viewport on the paper layout the template will of course be scaled as well.

The workflow I now use (which works - not sure if this is the "proper" way :-) )

1. Define the core scale of the paper layout, say 1:50
2. Put the 1:1 paper template with a scale of 50:1 on the paper to match
3. Create the viewports and put them in the layout they will then get the proper scale in the paper layout.

Originally I thought it would be possible to have a 1:1 paper scale and then put properly scaled viewports on that paper easily but as I understand this is the wrong way to do it.

Have I got this workflow right?

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andrew
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Re: Scaling of viewport

Post by andrew » Mon Jul 09, 2018 10:20 pm

The overall paper scale would typically be left at 1:1 for all paper spaces. That really only makes sense when paper spaces are not used at all and the model space is printed to scale instead.

The scale of the viewport is shown to the right. I suspect that you might be on a screen that is too small to show that.
Screen Shot 2018-07-09 at 22.17.06.png
Screen Shot 2018-07-09 at 22.17.06.png (58.22 KiB) Viewed 7227 times

johan162
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Posts: 17
Joined: Sun Jul 08, 2018 10:16 pm

Re: Scaling of viewport

Post by johan162 » Mon Jul 09, 2018 11:07 pm

Thanks, now i understand. However the reason I didn't see it is that it is actually impossible to access that menu item on a MBP 13 as the included attachment demonstrates.

Screen Shot 2018-07-10 at 00.01.19.png
Screen Shot 2018-07-10 at 00.01.19.png (146.69 KiB) Viewed 7221 times

In order to view it it is not even possible to click the "more" button but you really have to also move the left reset button to the second line since all the other icons seems to belong to the same menu as the scale (and that is after moving all the other normal menu items to a second line). So in the screenshot shown it is not possible to access it unless also the reset-arrow is moved to a separate line.

So I don't feel so bad that I missed that menu entry, it was like an archaeological dig to find it hidden (none of the "more" arrows shows this entry in the default menu on MBP. Even on my 15" MBP it does not by default show without heavy re-arrnagement of the menus :-)

Thanks for the great help in sorting this out! (Probably worth recording this in a FAQ)

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