If you consistently work from a customized LayOut document design, you can save your basic document framework as a template. Templates are also a great way to ensure documents use the same company branding, titleblocks, or project elements. When you save a LayOut document as a template, the template contains everything that currently appears in your document, including all entities, pages, and so on. You can then add any elements that are unique to your document. To save a LayOut document as a template, follow these steps:

LayOut’s scrapbooks help you store and access a wide variety of reusable entities. The Scrapbooks panel contains several premade scrapbooks for common entities like arrows or signs. You can also create your own custom scrapbooks for things like company logos or branding elements.Premade ScrapbooksTo get you started, LayOut includes the following premade scrapbooks:

With LayOut’s Style tool (), you can sample the style settings applied to one entity and apply those same settings to another entity.To apply a style from one entity to another, follow these steps:

In LayOut, layers enable you to control the entities on your document pages as follows:

In LayOut, groups are a way to keep related elements organized in the drawing area. Groups can also make selecting and copying multiple elements easier. For example, if you know you'll always want to select a text box and a shape together, make it a group so you just need to select it once.

To create a professional document, entities need to be arranged and sized just right. LayOut offers several tools to help you manipulate the entities in your document with precision.Using a GridLayOut documents include a grid that you can toggle on or off to help you align entities on a page. To see the grid, select View > Show Grid. When the grid is displayed, select View > Hide Grid to make it disappear. You can also context-click a blank space in the drawing area to select these options from the context menu.

Whether you’re an architect, woodworker, or engineer — basically, anyone who creates construction documents — you probably need to add tables to those documents. With LayOut’s table feature, you can create and edit tables of text in LayOut or import table data from an Excel file (.xlsx) or a .csv file. In the sections that follow, you discover how to create tables and edit their spacing, rows, columns, and cells. Also, find out how to format a table and table text.

LayOut's Linear Dimension () and Angular Dimension () tools can label a distance or angle. In the following figure, you see an example of a linear and an angular dimension.

With LayOut's Label tool (), you create a label entity with a text box, a line (technically called a leader), and an arrow or endpoint pointing to a specific item in the drawing area. The following figure illustrates a few ways you can customize labels:

Dressing up your text can add that extra professional touch to your LayOut document. For example, you might match the fonts and colors to your company’s or your client’s branding. And you definitely want to size the text so it’s easy to read. Much like any word processor or other program that handles text, LayOut also enables you to apply character formatting (such as bold, italics, color, superscript, and more) and paragraph formatting (such as horizontal alignment, vertical anchoring, line spacing, and lists). The following sections guide you through all your options.