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Al Whitley/4 min read

Configuring Vertical Viewports with Title Blocks and Text Files: A Step-by-Step Guide

Vertical Viewport Setup

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This tutorial walks through configuring vertical viewports with title blocks and text files, covering essential tools and techniques for your projects.

When we were first beginning our discussions of title blocks, title block text files, no-plot views, and drawing labels, I had shown you this drawing. And in this drawing, I talked about the standardization that most offices go through when they're configuring their sheet files.

We have just completed essentially this kind of a layout or, in other ways, this kind of a layout. Similar thing—title block, one viewport. What I'd like you to see though is this kind of a format.

So you can see that what's happening is I have my title block, I have my title block text file, I have an area for the keynotes, but instead I'm breaking the sheet up into two vertical viewports. So what I would like for us to do is to prepare yet more components so that we will have in our library the appropriate configurations for allowing this. When we were working on our drawing title one file, we had one drawing title that stretched all the way across the bottom.

So what we're going to do is we're going to create a drawing title two file that only goes halfway across. Similarly, when we were working on our viewport full, we're going to also make one that has the viewport half size. So let's begin by opening up our drawing title one.

So I'm going to go File, Open, and I'm going to open my drawing title one. And again, this stretches the entire width of the viewport. For drawing title two, we want it to be half as wide.

So I'm going to say stretch, I will do a crossing, Enter, from the end up here to the midpoint of that line. Zoom Extents, Zoom Real Time, save the file. If I type the command Base, it's 0,0,0.

If I were to draw a line from 0,0, you can see that it's coming from the bottom left corner. So what we've done is we've taken our VDCI drawing title one and we've made it half as long. So the next thing I want to do is to go File, Save As, and I will save it with the name VDCI drawing title two.

And I've overwritten the file. So again, now we have drawing title one, which is one viewport wide. And then we have drawing title two, which is half as wide.

Again, I'm going to save this. I'll go to File, Close, and now I'm going to start working on the viewport configurations. So I'll start going File, Open, and I'm going to open my no plot view full, and I will now go File, Save As, and I will save it as my no plot viewport vertical half size, no plot view vertical one over two.

Replace the file. So the difference here is that the viewport vertical is half as wide. So once again, I will say stretch.

I'll do a crossing, Enter, from the end of the top right to the middle of the line. Now my base point is zero. If I were to draw a line from zero, you can see it's coming out of here.

So what we need to do now is to move the geometry so that the center of the no plot view is at zero, and the easiest way is drawing a line from the end of here to the end of here, and then say Move, do a crossing, Enter, from the mid of the diagonal line to zero. Zoom Extents, Zoom Real Time, and I can erase the diagonal line. We now have the components that we could use for this kind of a configuration.

The next thing we're going to start working on are horizontal splits.