Export 2d House Plans

pmolsen

All I am doing is creating a typical floor plan layout of our building (apartment block) to include in a fire evacuation plan I am creating. So it is just a one-off. The page with the diagram on it will be A4 with the drawing probably occupying about half of the page.

The reason I was thinking of going via PNG was because I was intending to type the room names (Lounge, Kitchen etc) in Photoshop or similar. I find Sketchup's text processing to be annoying. The normal text cannot be "glued" in place. It keeps changing position to face the camera and changes size relative to the model as you zoom. 3D text is no good because it gives a double outline.

Dave R

Well, LayOut would make this all quite simple.

I'm not sure what you mean by 3D Text giving double outlines. I don't see that when I use 3D Text. You can make that text flat if you wish by unticking the Extrude box.

There's nothing you can do to change the fact that a PNG is a raster image and what you need for the crisp lines you're after is vector. If you get a converter as was mentioned, you should be able to make the vector lines from the PNG.

pmolsen

What I mean is that the 3D text is not single lines but double lines, filled or not, extruded or not.

Dave R

I've not seen that except with fonts that are open to begin with. Could you post an example?

TIG

If you mean it has edges, all ttf fonts will become 3d forms with some thickness, even 'stick' fonts.
If they are colored black the edges 'vanish'.
If you are using a Style with heavy profiles or extensions, the edges can look messy.
To fix that hide all edges.
Do this by editing the text's container and selecting all edges [either with a selection-tool or using the wireframe view-mode], Entity Info > hidden checked...

OR just try 2dTools Text tool that does all of this for you and allows text/color/size/font etc to be set and edited later if desired... The only 'different' thing to remember is to use a \n in the text-string to show any newlines...

mitcorb

Could I suggest TIG's 2d Tools. One of the tools is 2dText. It is not extruded. As default it is placed slightly above the surface. Or, is this not the problem?

pbacot

@unknownuser said:

I missed this. Where is this mentioned? Like Vect

I missed this. Where is this mentioned? Like VectorMagic?

Dave R

In my first post in the thread.

@dave r said:

If this is the sort of thing you need, it would be worth your while to switch to the Pro version of SketchUp. If you aren't going to do that, you'll need an application to create vector lines from your SketchUp file. Perhaps that means going through a CAD application although there are applications that will convert raster line work to Vector.

Yes, Vector Magic. Also http://wintopo.com/ and probably others.

pbacot

Oh, I see. Thanks.

pmolsen

Thanks for all the suggestions.

I ended up using CorelDraw Essentials X5 which I discovered was pre-installed on my (Aldi) laptop. It worked well. I was able to Copy in Corel and Paste-Special in Word, which is where I actually wanted the data to end up. Even re-sizing in Word still retained crisp lines without any anti-aliasing etc.