Page Proxies & Viewports
The Drafting phase (see Survey Phases) is where a survey project becomes a finished plan for lodgement. Two geometry types drive this: page proxies and viewports.
Page proxies
A page proxy lays out a drafting sheet at a chosen draw scale, on one of the standard paper sizes:
- ISO A-series (A0–A4)
- US (Letter, Legal, Tabloid, …)
- ANSI (A–E)
- ARCH (A–E)
Each page proxy becomes one page in the exported PDF (see PDF Export). A page can be assigned a sheet template (a title block) — see below.
Sheet templates
A sheet template supplies the title-block linework and text placed on top
of a page’s content, with substitutable fields like <PROJECT>, sheet
number, and sheet name.
Sheet templates can be imported directly from a DXF file’s paper-space
layout: NullCad recovers the layout’s true physical paper size from the
DXF’s embedded plot-settings (not just its arbitrary limits/extents), and
rescales non-millimeter content to fit. INSERT block references (common
for real title blocks) are expanded recursively.
Assigning a template to a sheet resizes the page to the smallest standard paper size that fully contains the template, so the template’s linework — laid out in its own physical millimeter coordinates — always ends up inside the visible page rather than centered against a mismatched size.
The Sheet Manager (accessible from the Drafting phase) lists all sheets in the document, lets you assign templates, fill in title-block field values, and reorder/renumber sheets.
Viewports
A viewport is a window placed on a Drafting-phase page that displays content from another phase (most commonly Boundary Model), with its own independent pan, zoom, and rotation — similar to a viewport in traditional CAD software. This is how survey/model geometry actually ends up on a printed sheet: you draft the page and title block in the Drafting phase, then open one or more viewports onto the phase that holds the real geometry.
Draw scale
Each page proxy has its own draw scale, so different sheets in the same document can be laid out at different scales (e.g. an overview sheet at 1:1000 and a detail sheet at 1:200). Linetype patterns (dashes, dots) on the Drafting-phase canvas follow whichever page’s draw scale the camera is currently nearest to, so on-screen dash spacing matches what will actually print on that sheet.