11.3 Arranging the sheet — Throwcast Manual

Double-click a page in the Reports section (or press Report in the mode switcher) and the sheet covers the viewport: the paper at its real proportions, the reserved title strip along the foot, and a toolbar across the top.

Table 11.2 The sheet toolbar.
Button	Does
+ 3D view	Puts the view you are looking at onto the page, and opens it for framing
+ Text	A text block, opened for typing
+ Cables / + Equipment	The two schedules
+ Diagram	The signal diagram, or a section of it
+ Blend array ▾ / + Rack ▾	Menus listing what the project has, rather than guessing one
Refresh	Take the cached pictures again (§11.4)
− + Fit	Zoom out, in, and fit the whole page in the window — the percentage between them is the current zoom. `Ctrl`+scroll does the same
Done	Leave report mode

A block is dragged by its middle and resized by its edge and corner grips. It snaps to the edges and centre lines of the other blocks and of the page itself, and draws the guide line that says why it stopped there — no grid, because a page is a composition rather than a spreadsheet, and what you actually want is this block’s left edge flush with that one’s.

A layout page being arranged: a table block dragged onto a snap guide — Figure 11.3 A sheet mid-drag. The blend-array table is being pulled down the page and has stopped on the orange line — the 3D view’s own centre line, which is what the guide is announcing. Nothing is written yet: the inspector on the right still reads the block’s stored Top, and `Esc` here would leave the page exactly as it was.

Table 11.3 On the sheet.
Input	Does
Click / `Ctrl`-click	Select a block / add to the selection
Drag on empty paper	Marquee-select
Double-click	Open the block: type into a text block, frame a 3D view
Arrow keys	Nudge — `Shift` for ten times the step
`Ctrl`+`D`	Duplicate the selection, offset and on top
`Del` / `Backspace`	Delete the selection
`Esc`	Close a text editor, then clear the selection

Nothing is written while a gesture is in flight: a drag or a resize is one undo entry and one save, and Esc mid-drag abandons it having written nothing. Typing into a text block is the same bargain one level up — the block is committed when the editor closes, so a paragraph is one Ctrl+Z rather than a hundred.

The inspector holds the numeric side of the same thing: Left, Top, Width and Height in millimetres from the printable area, a Stacking row (blocks are drawn in their own order, so this is what puts one in front of another), Duplicate and Delete, and whatever that kind of block is about.

Several blocks at once

Left, Top, Width and Height are the vocabulary every block has and cross kinds, so “these five, 60 mm wide” is one edit — and only the edge you typed travels, each block keeping its own other three. A schedule’s Group by, a rack block’s rack, a diagram block’s crop and a blend array’s Shows stop at the blocks of that kind. Duplicate, Delete and Stacking take the whole selection, the stack moving as one group so a selection does not shuffle against itself on the way up. The exception is a schedule’s Page (§11.7), which stays with its own block.

A page is a view, not a scene

While a report page is open the Add cluster and the gizmo rail are gone, the gizmo detaches, and the whole properties panel is read-only for anything that is not the report — an object, a cable, a viewpoint, a blend array. A page is a saved view over the one live scene, so an edit made while laying out a page silently changes every other page in the report, and a lens is swapped from an inspector rather than from a gizmo. The report, the page and the blocks stay live: they are the document you came here to edit. Selection, shading, the view cluster and the annotation tools stay live too — that is what report mode is for.