To create a professional document, entities need to be arranged and sized just right. To help you do that, LayOut includes several tools and features, including a grid, inference cues, and an Arrange menu. When you select an entity, its bounding box has tools for moving, rotating, and scaling the entity, or you can use the keyboard or the Measurements box to enter precise changes. See the following sections for details about nudging your entities into the right position.

Although documents tend to include more visual elements than text, you likely want a little text to add headings, bullet points, or other text to your document. In LayOut, you use the Text tool () to type text into a bounded or unbounded text box. You can also bring text into LayOut by importing a supported text document. In the following sections, you find out how all these text options work.

Every once in a while, depending on your SketchUp and LayOut preferences or perhaps the capabilities of your computer, SketchUp model entities don’t display well or at all in the LayOut document area. In this article, you find details and solutions to the most common SketchUp model entity display issues.

Although LayOut enables you to edit view and style settings without switching back to SketchUp, LayOut doesn't enable you to edit the actual model. For that, you must open the model file in SketchUp. When you need to edit the geometry or other SketchUp-only features, LayOut does make it easy to open a model in SketchUp and keep the updated SketchUp file synched with your LayOut document. Here's a quick look at the ways LayOut helps you manage changes and updates to SketchUp models:

Tip: Inserted SketchUp files can now contain Dashed Lines, to learn more about managing those new line types with inserted files, see Working with SketchUp Dashes in Imported Models Want to make your LayOut document a little more well-rounded? Perhaps a circle or ellipse can help.

Choosing a Template The first thing you will see when opening LayOut is the Welcome Window.