The Pages Drop Down menu

While you will do most of your design work in model space, GardenCAD offers a space for presenting many views of the design on any size sheet required. In other words, GardenCAD drawings can contain more than one page.

The first page seen when you start GardenCAD, represents the "Model Space" and is used to create the main drawing (using the the drawing editor). When you create a new drawing, that space is already there and is listed as the first entry in the Select Page dialog box shown in the figure below. When added, additional pages represent two-dimensional paper sheets used to compose or lay out your model drawing for printing. These may consist of a title block, one or more view ports, and annotations.

The Pages Palette. In this design, 6 different layout views has been developed from model space.

The figure below shows Page 4 from the list above; a design for a metal screen designed to be hung on a side wall.

Design for a panel to be hung on a wall or screen.

Be creative with pages

The Pages Drop Down menu enables you to be quite creative when using GardenCAD. Story boards utilising hand sketches and photos of plant species from your image library similar to those shown below can be developed.

Some examples

Here are some small movies which show how the Pages Palette might be used.

Storing species information on pages.

Some users have reported using pages to store information about each species used in a design.

Click here to play a movie which shows one example of how the Pages palette might be used to store photos and descriptive information about a species. Here is the YouTube version of the same movie.

Using the Pages Palette on a more complex project.

Do not be timid about setting up as many pages as you wish to properly document a design. The first figure below shows an an example of a design plotted from model space into layout space (pages) on an A2 sheet at a scale of 1:100. Subsequent figures show other pages from the model. Layers visibility is controlled to generate many drawings from the one model.

A block (called all) was created in model space. After switching to layout space via the pages palette and selecting an A2 sheet, the block was inserted at a scale of 1:100 (scale value 0.01)

The concept plan. Here the chosen paper size does not quite match the plot value.  In this case, we would have like to use 1:75 in order for the design to fill the page, but that's not an approved scale. The Australian standard for technical drafting allows a relatively small set of approved scales. Always aim to maximize the view of the design as shown in the 'Urrbrae Designers' layout shown above.

Design for entertaining area - combination of hand sketches, photographs and computer drawn images.

Click here to play a movie which shows how to use the BLOCK command to create a block (called all) which is then inserted into an A2 Sheet in a layout space. Here is the YouTube version of the same movie.

Here are the appropriate scale values to achieve a desired plot scale.

Intended Scale	Scale value
1:5	0.2
1:10	0.1
1:20	0.05
1:50	0.02
1:100	0.01
1:200	0.005
1:500	0.002
1:1000	0.001

We hope that you can see the value of pages in the GardenCAD environment.

Review

Please review your knowledge of the material in this module before progressing to the next stage. Click the back button to return to the menu of modules.