Drawings & Plan Sheets¶

The Drawings workspace is TrafficCAD's sheet composer: a full-screen, multi-sheet editor where your live plan becomes a titled, true-to-scale drawing set. What you see on the paper stage is exactly what exports to PDF — the stage and the PDF share one renderer, so there are no export surprises.

Opening the workspace¶

Click Drawings in the top toolbar (tooltip: "Drawings — generate traffic control plan sheets"). It's also in the command palette under Project.

The workspace opens directly — the first time on a blank sheet S-1 ("Traffic Control Plan"). To frame the plan, click Viewport in the top bar:

Drag a box on the map to frame the view — Shift keeps the sheet aspect, Esc cancels

Drag the box and the viewport lands on the sheet, fitted to the nearest standard engineering scale. The first viewport you add becomes the sheet's plan view; add as many more as you need the same way.

The workspace at a glance¶

Three panes:

• Sheets (left) — the sheet navigator: add, reorder, duplicate, delete sheets.
• The paper stage (center) — a WYSIWYG rendering of the current sheet. Everything on it is selectable and draggable.
• The inspector (right) — properties for the selected item, plus the drawing-set fields (title block, paper, logo).

The top bar holds the add-item buttons, Undo/Redo, zoom controls (Zoom in / Zoom out / Fit), and Preview PDF / Export PDF.

The Drawings workspace: sheet navigator left, WYSIWYG paper stage center, inspector right, add-item buttons across the top.

Managing sheets¶

In the Sheets navigator:

New sheets auto-number S-2, S-3, … — and follow whatever prefix you renumber to, so a set changed to TCP-1 carries on TCP-2, TCP-3. Every sheet shares the drawing set's paper size, title-block style, and project fields, so the set stays consistent.

What you can put on a sheet¶

The top-bar buttons add items to the current sheet:

Every viewport can carry a north arrow and scale bar — toggle them in the viewport inspector. Each viewport also carries a small TrafficCAD wordmark in its bottom-right corner; it is part of the frame chrome (not a sheet item), so it prints on every export and can't be moved or deleted.

Viewports: live captures with vector markups¶

A viewport is not a screenshot. The basemap is captured live, and your markups render on top as crisp vectors — signs, device chains, roads, walkpaths, parking lots, fences, channelizers, TTC plans, pavement markings, work areas, and dimensions are all re-drawn at paper scale, identical to the PDF output.

A single-sheet set: the viewport captures the basemap live and re-draws every markup as vectors at paper scale.

• Everything stays in sync. Move a sign on the map and the sheet, legend, and schedules update. Move it on the sheet and the map updates — sheet edits write back to the same markup store.
• Edit markups on the paper stage: select, drag, rotate (R for +15°, Shift+R for −15°), and delete (Del) signs right on the sheet. Plan viewports are fully editable; 3D insets are select/delete only.
• Recapture: pan/zoom/imagery changes recapture automatically ("capturing…" shows in the top bar). Use Redraw extent… to reframe a viewport, or the refresh button ("Recapture the basemap") to force a fresh capture.
• Basemap masks are the one markup that bakes into the raster — they hide map features under everything, which is their job.

Set a viewport's Scale from the grouped dropdown — Engineering (imperial): 1"=10' through 1"=100'; Metric: 1:100 through 1:2500 — or keep the auto-fitted value (shown as "1" = 50' (fitted)"). A viewport's Basemap can be the default map style or Aerial imagery, with per-viewport imagery overrides — see Aerial Imagery & 3D.

Arranging and editing items¶

• Move — drag. Shift constrains to the dominant axis. Items snap to a 1/16-inch paper grid.
• Duplicate in place — Ctrl-drag an item CAD-style; the copy drags and it's one undo step.
• Resize — drag the edge/corner handles. Tables, legends, notes, and mount details resize by width (they flow their own height). Shift locks aspect on viewports and images.
• Vector templates — double-click an inserted MUTCD figure to enter node editing: move element vertices, edit text (font, size, alignment), restyle fills/strokes/hatches, delete elements with Del, exit with Esc. Node text supports Helvetica, Times, and the Highway Gothic series (B–F, E-Modified).
• Undo — the top-bar Undo (Ctrl+Z) / Redo (Ctrl+Shift+Z) buttons act on whatever changed last, whether that was a sheet item or a map markup.

Paper sizes and title blocks¶

Paper (set once for the whole set): ANSI A (11"×8.5"), ANSI B (17"×11") — the default, ANSI D (34"×22"), ARCH D (36"×24"), and ISO A4/A3/A2/A1/A0.

Title block — two styles, chosen in the inspector:

• Bottom bar (traffic plan) (default) — the strip along the bottom: DRAWN BY / ID / DATE / EXPIRY / CHECKED cells, the TITLE cell (project location + work description), a north arrow, TRAFFIC PLAN No., and SHEET + REV with "n OF m".
• Right strip (engineering) — the classic right-edge strip: brand block, COMPANY, PROJECT, CLIENT, PROJECT No, DRAWN BY, CHECKED BY, DATE, SCALE, a five-row REV/DATE/DESCRIPTION revision table, the sheet title, and the big sheet number.

Fill the set-wide fields in the inspector — Project / location, Work description (title lines), Traffic plan no., Drawn by, ID, Date, Expiry, Checked by, Company, Client — plus Upload logo… and Disclaimer (under the logo) to brand this document.

A new drawing set starts from your firm's Company info, so the name, logo, and disclaimer are usually already there. The brand cell prints the logo if there is one, the Company name if there isn't, and falls back to "TrafficCAD / TRAFFIC CONTROL" when neither is set. Editing them here changes this document only — existing sheets never re-brand when the firm's defaults change.

The quick single-sheet exporter¶

For one-sheet jobs, click the dropdown arrow beside the toolbar's Drawings button and choose Sheet export… : pick Paper, Scale, and Layout (Single view, Plan + 3D inset, Two views) and click Export sheet PDF — it centers the sheet on the current map view at the chosen scale, with the cited basis-of-design notes in the GENERAL NOTES column. The title fields arrive prefilled from your Company info (firm name, logo, and disclaimer) plus the Project properties on the left rail's Settings tab; any edit in the dialog applies to the current project only. For anything beyond one sheet, use the Drawings workspace.

Persistence¶

The drawing set — sheets, items, title-block fields, logo — is saved inside the project file and restored exactly on reopen, like every other part of the project. See Projects.