Technical drawings

The Drawings view is a WYSIWYG editor for print-ready drawing sheets. A sheet is a real page — ANSI or ISO paper, a frame, a title block — onto which you place content blocks: the harness diagram, a wire schedule, a BOM, pinout cards, notes, and a to-scale formboard for the build table.

Sheets are part of the document: they save into the .loomflow file, every edit is undoable, and all harness-derived content (tables, diagrams, counts) is recomputed live from the design — a sheet can never show stale data. What you see in the editor is the exact same SVG the export writes.

Manage sheets

Switch a pane to Drawings using the pane switcher (top-right of the pane). If the document has no sheets yet, click ＋ Add drawing sheet — the first sheet arrives with a sensible default composition: the harness diagram across the top, the wire schedule bottom-left, and a notes block bottom-right, clear of the title block.

Sheets appear as tabs in the strip along the top of the pane:

• Click a tab to switch to that sheet; ＋ adds a new sheet (named Sheet 1, Sheet 2, …).
• Right-click a tab for sheet actions: Duplicate sheet, Move left / Move right, and Delete sheet (asks for confirmation).
• Tab order is print order — the multi-page PDF export follows the strip left to right.

Zoom with the − / ＋ buttons, Ctrl + scroll wheel (15%–400%), or Fit to fit the page to the pane. With split panes, two Drawings panes can show different sheets side by side.

Place content blocks

Right-click an empty spot on the page to add a block at that point:

Block	Contents
Harness diagram	The layout drawing scaled to fit the block — nodes, trunks with length dimensions, labels.
Formboard (to scale)	The harness at true printed scale — see The formboard below.
Wire schedule	The live cut list scoped to the sheet: #, From, To, Signal, Ga, Color, Int P/N, Len.
BOM	Scoped bill of materials: Type, Description, Int P/N, Qty.
Pinout cards	One card per in-scope connector: cavity → signal, with gauge and color.
Notes	An auto-numbered notes list with an editable title (one note per line in the Inspector).
Revision history	A REV / DATE / DESCRIPTION / BY table fed by the sheet’s revision rows.
Text / callout	Free text — size, alignment, bold, and an optional leader line for callouts.
Image	Any image file (a photo, a detail view); bundled into the document on save.

Working with blocks on the page:

• Click to select — the Inspector switches to that block’s settings (including exact X/Y/Width/Height in points).
• Drag to move; drag the eight corner and edge handles to resize.
• Arrow keys nudge the selected block by 1 pt, Shift+arrow by 10 pt.
• Delete removes the selected block; Esc deselects back to the sheet.
• Right-click a block for Duplicate block, Bring forward / Send backward (draw order), and Delete block.

Blocks are clamped to the page, so nothing can be dragged off the paper. Tables that don’t fit their block don’t silently clip — the last line reads …and N more (enlarge block) so you know to resize.

To make a callout, right-click a text block and choose Add leader line, then drag the leader’s dot to point at the detail. The line is drawn from the block to the dot.

The sheet inspector

Click an empty part of the page (or the sheet’s tab) and the Inspector shows the sheet’s own settings.

Scope — what the sheet draws

A sheet draws either the whole layout or one named harness. Every derived block — diagram, formboard, wire schedule, BOM, pinout cards — recomputes to that scope, and so do the title block’s connector and wire counts. Pick a scope from the dropdown, which lists every detected harness with its node count (see Harness groups); selecting an unnamed harness names it automatically so the sheet has a stable reference. Per-harness sheets are what a builder actually works from.

Page size and orientation

Choose from ANSI A (8.5×11") through ANSI D (22×34") and ISO A4 through ISO A1, in landscape or portrait. Sheet coordinates are PDF points, so the exported PDF page is exactly this paper size.

Templates — frame and title block

The template supplies the page frame, optional border and zone markers (A/B/C letters down the sides, numbers across the top and bottom edges), and the title-block layout. Three built-ins are seeded into the document with the first sheet:

• Engineering — ANSI — full title block with a company banner, logo slot, TITLE, DWG NO, REV, SHEET, UNITS, SCALE, CONNECTORS, and DRAWN/CHK/APPR cells.
• Engineering — ISO — the same block on ISO paper defaults.
• Minimal — a compact strip: title, date, rev, sheet number.

Border and Zones checkboxes toggle those features per template. To share a company title block across projects, select the template and click Export — this writes a .loomtemplate file — and on any other machine or document click Import… to load it and apply it to the sheet. Templates also travel inside the .loomflow file itself, so collaborators opening your document see the right title block without importing anything.

Logo, title-block values, and revisions

• Logo — templates with a logo slot show an Upload… button; the image is bundled into the file and drawn in the title block (an empty slot prints a dashed LOGO placeholder).
• Title block — static cells (company name, DRAWN, CHK, APPR, SCALE) are edited here, and some auto cells accept a per-sheet override (DWG NO otherwise auto-fills from the scoped harness group’s assembly P/N). The rest fill themselves: TITLE from the document name, DATE from the export date, SHEET as i / n, UNITS from the document’s length unit, CONNECTORS from the in-scope count.
• Revision history — add rows with ＋ Add revision (auto-increments A → B → C and stamps today’s date), each with rev, date, description, and author. The rows print in any Revision history block on the sheet, and the newest rev fills the title block’s REV cell.

The formboard

The Formboard (to scale) block draws the harness at true printed scale — trunk directions follow your layout arrangement, but every trunk’s drawn length comes from its measured length. Printed at the right size, the sheet becomes a build board: lay the wires directly on the paper.

• Print scale — pick 1:1, 1:2, 1:4 (the default) or 1:8 in the block’s Inspector. 1:1 on large paper (ANSI C/D, ISO A2/A1) is a real full-size formboard.
• Scale bar — every formboard carries a scale bar in its bottom-left corner labeled with a real length (500 mm · to scale). After printing, measure it: if it’s off, the printer scaled the page. Always print at 100% / “Actual size”, never “fit to page”.
• Grid — a light reference grid in real units (default step 50), toggleable, with the step editable in the Inspector.

Each trunk prints its length in a label at its midpoint. A trunk with no measured length is drawn at a fallback length with a red ? label — go back to the Layout view and set trunk lengths first. Mated connector pairs are drawn adjacent with a short dashed link, and disconnected harness sections stack vertically inside the block.

Export the sheets

Choose ☰ → Export → Technical drawings (PDF / SVG)…. Your composed sheets are listed by name at the top of the dialog:

• SVG saves one sheet per file.
• PDF exports true-vector pages at the sheet’s real paper size — an ANSI D sheet becomes an ANSI D PDF page, so a 1:1 formboard prints at physical scale.
• All sheets (PDF, shown with two or more sheets) writes the whole set as one PDF pack in tab-strip order.

The same dialog also offers quick auto-generated sheets for documents that haven’t composed any — see Exporting for the full rundown and file naming.