How do I…
Crop a blueprint
Pull the crop window in from the sides of a page, erase clutter, and see what is being cut away before it is cut.
Where to find it: select a blueprint (Properties › Sheet › Blueprints › the pencil) › Prepare blueprint › step 1 Clean up
Cropping takes the edges off a blueprint: a title block, a wide border, a second drawing sharing the page. Clean up is the first step of preparing a blueprint.
- Choose Crop at the bottom. The whole page comes into view with a window around it.
- Drag the marks on the four sides and the four corners inwards. What falls outside the window stays on screen, dimmed, so you can see what you are about to lose.
- Drag inside the window to slide it around the page.
- Press Next (or Done from another step) when it is right.
The same tools erase clutter: Erase an area drags a box, Erase a shape draws around it, and Brush paints over it. Fill paints the erased part in the colour you pick; Transparent lets the sheet show through. Move around drags the page, and the zoom buttons come with it.
Nothing is cut until you leave the step. Until then the crop is a window and not a cut: drag it back out whenever you like, press Reset crop or double-click the page to take the whole image in again, or press Esc to put it back the way it was when you chose Crop. The line beside Reset crop counts the pixels the window keeps.
Leaving the step saves the clean-up as one drawing edit, and Undo in the drawing takes all of it back at once. The × closes the screen and keeps what you did.
Finger, pencil or keyboard
Each mark is a finger-sized target and works the same with a finger, an Apple Pencil and a mouse. Tab moves between the marks, and the arrow keys nudge the one you are on by a pixel, ten with Shift held. The letters C, E, L and B pick the tools.
What a crop changes, and what it does not
What is kept stays exactly where it was on the sheet, at the same size, so devices stay over the same part of the drawing and its scale is kept; only the blueprint's box shrinks to it.
Cropping again crops what is left, and the parts already taken off cannot be brought back by widening the window. The page that was saved is never touched: Re-import at full quality on a PDF blueprint reads it again, whole. Because of that, a cropped vector blueprint's hidden parts are covered rather than removed in every PDF made from it, a download and a share link's PDF both still hold them, while the pages shown on the share link itself are pictures of the cropped drawing. The clean-up screen says so in one grey line. See what hiding does, and what it does not.
See also move, resize or clean up a blueprint.