Drawing the event to scale

Drawing it to scale

The site planner turns a booking’s design into a drawing. Open Site plans from the booking or its design page, pick the venue, and drag what you booked into place. The booking’s own venue is offered first: the first plan there saves it as a venue, and every later plan at that address reuses it. For an outdoor site, follow Set it on the mapto place it on the map first. A venue is the building or ground itself: upload its floor plan and tell the planner how wide it really is, or place it on a map for an outdoor job. Walls, doors and pillars are drawn once on the venue and show, locked, under every plan there.

The plan only positions things. How many chairs there are is still decided by the design, so changing a quantity there redraws the plan, and the plan can never disagree with the booking. Items you have booked but not yet placed wait in the tray.

Draw a zone and it becomes an area of the design. Shapes and markers live under Add in five groups (areas, routes and access, infrastructure, workforce and a library of décor), and typing in Find a marker searches them all. Whatever you pick lands in the middle of the view, ready to move, so a plan can be drawn without a mouse. Drop a table inside a tent inside a lawn and it files under the tent. Delete a drawing and the placement stays on the design; it simply shows as placed but not drawn. A zone and its area share one name, so renaming either renames both, and dropping an item outside every zone lets you name a new area on the spot.

Maps load from the open street map by default. If one cannot load, the plan shows on a plain grid and says so.

Colour and line style

Select a shape, line or zone and open Style in the inspector to choose a colour from the palette, the line width, solid, dashed or dotted, and the fill. Lines can carry an arrowhead at either end or both. Pick several things and a setting they do not share reads Mixed until you choose one. Colours are names, so they stay readable in light and dark. Until you style an object it looks as it always did.

Base map and view angle

On an outdoor plan, the base-map menu switches between streets, satellite and a hybrid of the two, or a plain grid with no map. Satellite imagery appears only if your Event Managr is set up with an imagery provider; without one, a plan saved on satellite shows streets instead and says so. The choice is saved with the plan and can be undone.

Rotate the view to line the drawing up with how people will stand in the space; a reading in the toolbar shows the angle and resets it to 0°. On an indoor plan the drawing turns the same way. The sheet, the share page and the PNG show the plan at its saved angle. Only people who can edit plans change the base map or the angle; everyone else sees the saved view.

Undo and redo

Every change to a plan saves straight away and can be undone: use the arrows in the toolbar, or Ctrl+Z to undo and Ctrl+Shift+Z to redo (Cmd on a Mac). The last fifty steps are kept until you leave the page. A change that cannot be saved, with no signal say, is put back and the plan says so.

If somebody else changed the same thing since, the undo is skipped and the plan says so, rather than putting back something that is no longer true. Deleting an area that is also drawn on another plan of the same booking cannot be undone from this plan.

Working on several things at once

Shift-click to add to the selection, or drag a box around empty canvas to pick everything wholly inside it. On a phone, open the list and turn on Select to tick rows instead. Drag one and the rest move with it; the arrow keys nudge them all by 10 cm, or a metre with Shift.

With two or more picked, Line up aligns their edges or centres, and with three or more it can space them evenly.

Copy, duplicate and Repeat

Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V copy and paste, and Ctrl+D or Duplicate copies in one go. A copy of a booked item adds to the design: past what you booked, the design page shows it as over-placed rather than refusing it. A copy of a zone is a plain shape, because each area has one footprint.

Repeat lays out copies in a row. On a booked block it shares the quantity instead: forty chairs repeated four times are four blocks of ten, and nothing extra is placed. Split breaks a block into single items. Both stop at 250 at a time.

Freeform zones

Choose Freeform zone and click each corner; the length of every side shows as you draw. Right-click removes the last corner, and double-click or Enter finishes. On a phone, use the Undo corner and Finish zone buttons. Once it is an area, it counts towards capacity like any other zone.

Snapping

While you drag, objects snap to a half-metre grid and to the edges and centres of whatever is nearby, and a dashed guide shows what they snapped to. Hold Alt to place freely, or turn snapping off with the magnet in the toolbar.

Folders, hiding and locking

Under Placed, group objects into folders. Hide a folder to take everything in it off the drawing, or lock it so nothing in it can be moved or deleted by accident. Single objects can be hidden and locked too. Hidden and locked things stay in the list, which is where you show or unlock them again. Tap a folder’s name to rename it; its More menu moves it up or down or deletes it, and deleting a folder leaves what was in it on the plan.

The Venue folder holds the walls and fixed features. You can hide them on a plan; they are changed only on the venue’s own page.

Print, PDF and sharing

Print / export on a plan opens it as a sheet: your logo and company, the booking, the venue, the plan’s name and the day it was printed across the top; the drawing fitted to the paper; a scale bar; and a legend of the booked items drawn on this plan with their quantities, then the zones with their areas. Outdoor plans print over the map at the plan’s saved angle, with a north arrow; if the map cannot load, the plan keeps that angle and arrow on a plain grid. Pick A4 or A3, portrait or landscape, then Print / Save as PDF and choose “Save as PDF” in your browser’s print window for a file. Anything hidden on the plan, on its own or by its folder, is left off the sheet, the legend and the image alike.

Download PNG saves the same sheet as an image. If an indoor plan’s floor-plan image cannot be copied into a picture, the button stays off and says so; printing to PDF still includes it. If the floor-plan image cannot load at all, the sheet is drawn without it and tells you, and so does a PNG that could not be made.

Share makes a link anyone can open without an account, to view the plan and never change it. The link is live: whoever has it sees your changes the next time they open it. Add a password if the link may travel further than you meant; a viewer who enters it stays in for 12 hours. New link stops the old one working at once, and changing the password asks everybody for the new one. Stop sharing turns the link off; sharing again makes a fresh one. A shared plan says so on the booking’s list of plans.