Preparing a template with a title block

- The first step in building a sheet set is to create a drawing template for your sheets. Click the New icon in the Quick Access toolbar and open this arrow next to Open to create a drawing without using a template. You need to select your system of units, so. In this project, I'll be using imperial units but the process is much the same in metric. Click Layout1 to go to the default layout. If you see a view port here, erase it. You can control whether or not a view port is automatically generated in options. Type OP enter for options. On the Display tab, it's this setting right here which will automatically create a view port. I have it deselected. And that's why we don't see a view port right now. We need to customize this blank sheet of paper to correspond to the sheets that we anticipate using in our project. So, right click on Layout1 and choose Page Setup Manager. Create a new page set up and give it a name. I like to call the page setups according to their sheet size so in this case, I'll call this Arch D to correspond to an industry standard size. If you're using metric you might call this A3 or A4. OK. Choose the DWF6 eplot driver and then select your chosen paper size from this list. In our case, I'll chose Arch D 36 by 24 inches. You can see the preview right here. It's in landscape orientation. We're plotting the layout at a scale of one to one. We also need to specify a plot style table. Choose Monochrome so that all the lines appear in black. Also, don't forget to display the plot styles in the layout so that everything appears as it will print. Click OK and this last step is one that I often forget. Double click on Arch D and that sets it as the current page setup. And then click Close. So, now we're looking at a sheet of 24 inches high by 36 inches wide. The next step is to draw a title block on the sheet. Type LA for layer and create a new layer for the title block, call it Border, and set that layer current by double clicking right here. Change the line weight to something much thicker. I'll use .7 millimeters, OK. And close the layer manager. Then draw a rectangle. You actually can't snap to the paper itself. You just have to eyeball it. So, just click and then move the cursor down here. And if you want to be accurate you would just type in the paper size. 36, -24 in this case, 'cause I started in the upper left-hand corner. I need to use a negative value in the Y direction. And it looks like I didn't quite hit it right. There's a little gap there. No problem, I'll just move that up. And so that it's mostly centered. Now, I need to offset that rectangle on the outside edge of the paper inside some distance to give a border. So, I'll type O for offset, enter, .75, enter, to specify three quarters of an inch, click the border, and then click inside. Enter. Then erase the outer rectangle by selecting it and pressing delete. You can see that this border is just inside the dashed rectangle which represents the limits of this plot driver. And it might be just a little bit high. I'm gonna move it down again. Just a little bit. Like that. Can zoom in here and yes, the border is inside the dashed rectangle all the way around. So, it will print. I'm going to explode the rectangle by typing X enter and then offset three inches and then repeat offset, and this time one inch will offset that up and then trim, offset again, and one more time with a distance of .5 or half an inch, like that. So, I've created a number of boxes in the title block. So, I have places to put the sheet number, sheet title, project number, project name, and so on. So, in building the template, you have to think ahead to anything that's going to be common across the entire sheet set. I can think of a couple of layers that I'll need. I'll create a new layer called Text and another one called Viewport. I actually want to have all of these layers kept together in the alphabetical listing of layer names. So, something I like to do is put letter Z in front. So, Z-Viewport, Z-Text, and Z-Border. That way, in the future these layers will be alphabetized at the bottom of the list and I'll know that they're part of the sheet. I'll set the Text layer current and I'll toggle off the Viewport layer. Let's save this. So, type SA enter to Save As, change the type of drawing from DWG to DWT for a template. I don't want to save it in the Default Template folder. It's nested very deeply in the folder hierarchy. Instead, I'm going to save it in the Exercise Files folder and in the Project Sheet Set subfolder. I'll call this template Arch D, Save. And for a description I'll call this the sheet set template, OK.