Aligning Sheets for Printing: Grid vs Detail Line Method

In this video, let's just make some final alignment adjustments on our sheet before we print the PDF. So let's go ahead and start at our FP1 site plan. Now there is a way we can set up a grid, actually, and line everything up that way.

So I'll show you two options—with the grid, and then another one I personally like to use with detail lines. So first, let's go ahead and find the View tab. And you should see this Guide Grid.

And let's just use Guide Grid 1. And now what you can see here is this overlay—you can have distances between certain boxes to locate different items and adjust as needed. This works.

Now to turn that off, all you have to do is go to the Properties of your sheet, go ahead and select None. Okay, what I like to do instead is use a detail line. So let's do this first with our sheet titles.

So what I'm going to do is type DL. And if this is the spot, I'll say right here is where the location of the titles on all of my sheets will be. So I'm going to zoom in and find the very center of the circle—you kind of have to eyeball it—but this will be okay.

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And I'm going to draw a detail line somewhere to there. Now, like we've done before, I'm going to go to Copy to Clipboard. And now we don't have this on our FP2 sheet with all of our details.

So I'm going to skip to FP3 and I'm going to align to current view. I'm going to go to FP4, align to current view, FP5, align to current view, and FP6, align to current view. Okay, now it's just a matter of moving these to the end of that detail line and using the arrow key. That's good.

Zoom out. Okay, let's go to FP5. And I'll do the same thing. If you hold Shift with the arrow key, you will move in larger jumps.

So you'll alternate between holding Shift and not. Might have to zoom in. Okay.

Actually, when we're done, we can go ahead and delete the detail line. Back to FP4, and FP3, zoom in, and FP1—we can delete that. Okay.

Now let's do the same thing to our piping and reflected ceiling plans for the building. So let's go back to FP3, Level 1 piping plan. And I'm going to say this is a good spot.

Now I'm going to take a detail line again, and I'm going to find the edge of the outside building corner near the gym area. Again, it's not going to snap, so we'll eyeball it. Okay.

Now I'm going. Okay. Now I'm going to find this corner of the outside of the building of the gym area and use my detail line, and I'll have to eyeball it to about there.

Let me even move that down just a bit. Okay. Now we'll do the same thing.

We will select it, Copy to Clipboard. Now let's go to FP4, zoom out a bit, align to current view. And FP5, align to current view.

And lastly, FP6, align to current view. Okay. Now the corner should end up right there.

So I'm going to click into my plan. And again, I'll just use the arrow key and Shift if I need to for larger jumps. Okay.

That's good. When I'm done, go ahead and delete. Now let's do a zoom extents.

So by double-clicking your middle mouse button, and you'll see at the end of this procedure why this is going to be helpful. Let's go ahead and go to FP5. All right.

That's pretty good. Zoom extents—double-click middle mouse button—and FP4. All right.

And one more sheet: FP3, which we already did. Perform zoom extents. Now if I start at FP3 and then FP4, FP5, FP6, you'll see that corner is in the same location.

So it gives a nice base point for our plans on our sheets. Okay. We have cleaned up our plans.

We have cleaned up our sheets. We have added extra detail and aligned everything. All that's left is to print to PDF.

So I will see you in the final video coming up next.