Creating Professional Drawing Sheets in Ploterr

The gap between a working design and a presentable drawing has always cost more time than it should. You finish thinking through a floor plan, and then you spend an hour composing it into a sheet, scaling it correctly, adding the titleblock, and exporting a PDF that will be out of date by the time it reaches the client. In most workflows that composition step is separate from the design step — a different tool, a different file, a manual process.

In Ploterr, it is not. Sheets live in the same canvas as the model, viewports pull from live views, and PDF export is one click. Presentation mode then lays all your sheets on an infinite canvas with connectors, so the full drawing set is navigable without switching files.

This is how it works.

Sheets: professional drawing composition

A sheet in Ploterr is a paper-format canvas with viewports. You choose the paper size (A4, A3, A2, or custom), set portrait or landscape, and then compose the sheet by placing viewports and annotations.

Viewports

A viewport is a window into a named view from the 3D canvas. You can have as many viewports on a sheet as you want, each pointing to a different view:

• A floor plan (orthographic top-down cut at a specific level)
• A 3D perspective from a saved camera position
• A site plan showing the full site layout
• A section view through the building

Viewports are dragged into position on the sheet. Each viewport has an independent scale setting — the floor plan at 1:100, a detail at 1:50, the site plan at 1:200. You resize the viewport frame and the content scales inside it.

Because viewports pull from live views, not exported images, they stay in sync with the model. If you move a wall on the canvas, the floor plan viewport on the sheet reflects the change the next time you open it.

Titleblock

The titleblock appears at the bottom-right of the sheet by default, with fields for project name, sheet title, sheet number, date, and author. Every field is editable directly in the sheet editor. You can toggle the titleblock visible or hidden per sheet — useful if you want a sheet without a border for an internal working document.

Text annotations

Beyond the titleblock, you can add free text annotations anywhere on the sheet — room names, dimensions, notes, north arrows, scale bars. Text annotations have a position on the sheet and a font size. They are sheet-level content, not canvas geometry, so they do not affect the model.

PDF export

When the sheet is composed, export to PDF in one click. The export produces a full-resolution PDF at the correct paper dimensions. You can also export individual canvas views as PNG, JPEG, or SVG if you need raster images for reports or presentations.

	Ploterr Sheets	Separate layout tool
Sheet and model in same file	Yes	No
Viewports pull from live model views	Yes	no — exported images
Titleblock editable in context	Yes	Varies
PDF export	Yes	Yes
Multiple viewports per sheet	Yes	Yes
Updates when model changes	Yes	no — requires re-export
All sheets navigable in one view	yes (Presentation mode)	No

Early access · 25% off

Plan faster. Decide sooner.

Join the waitlist

Presentation mode: all sheets on one canvas

Presentation mode is a different view of the same project. Where the sheet editor shows one sheet at a time, Presentation mode lays all sheets on an infinite canvas — side by side, in whatever arrangement makes sense — and lets you pan and zoom across the full drawing set.

This is the digital equivalent of pinning everything to a wall. You can see the site plan beside the ground floor plan beside the typical floor plan beside the section, all at once, all at the same scale if you want. It is immediately useful for project reviews — you navigate the presentation by panning and zooming, not clicking through slides.

Flow connectors

Connectors are arrows between sheets that show document structure. A connector from the site plan to the ground floor plan signals "this floor plan belongs to this site." A connector from an option A sheet to an option B sheet shows the comparison structure. You can arrange sheets in a narrative flow — site → massing → floor plans → details — and the connectors make the story legible to anyone reviewing the set.

Connectors are especially useful for client presentations. Instead of advancing through a slide deck, you start at the site plan and navigate inward — zooming into floor plans, following connectors to option comparisons, panning to sections and details. The spatial navigation matches how architects actually think about buildings.

Navigating the presentation

In Presentation mode you pan by dragging, zoom with scroll or pinch. Click any sheet to zoom to it. The flow connectors stay visible as you navigate so you always know where you are in the document structure.

This is also the view you share with a client when you want them to navigate the drawing set themselves, rather than seeing a recorded walkthrough or a flat PDF. They open Presentation mode and explore.

The full workflow: from brief to drawing set

Here is how Sheets and Presentation mode fit into a Ploterr session:

1. Generate or draw the design — use text-to-CAD to generate an initial layout, or draw directly on the canvas with walls, slabs, and site elements.
2. Save named views — a top-down floor plan for each level, a 3D perspective from the street, a site plan. Name them clearly.
3. Compose sheets — create a sheet for each piece of the drawing set, place viewports, add titleblock and annotations. A site plan sheet, a ground floor sheet, an upper floor sheet, and an options comparison sheet can all be composed in one session.
4. Add connectors in Presentation mode — arrange the sheets in narrative order and draw connectors to show the document structure.
5. Export — PDF from each sheet for email; share Presentation mode for the client review meeting.

The quantity takeoff runs automatically throughout — wall areas and slab volumes are live in the model from step one, available as a rollup table whenever you need them. The drawing set and the quantities come from the same model, so they are always consistent.

The goal of Sheets is to remove the separate layout step that currently sits between "design is done" and "client receives a drawing." When the composition tool is the same tool as the design tool, that gap closes. The drawing set is always ready because it is always current.

Early access · 25% off

Plan faster. Decide sooner.

Join the waitlist