How to Print a Plan

VisionPlan packages your floor plan and its supporting schedules into a single PDF you can print on paper or share digitally. The print pipeline is one round-trip: you press Print, answer a couple of dialog prompts, and the app hands you either the OS print preview or a PDF download. There's no separate "export" tool — every output goes through the same dialog.

This article walks the standard whole-plan flow. For the marquee variant (drag a box to print only part of the plan), see Use the print area marquee.

Open the Print dialog

There are two ways to start a print:

• Print button in the editor toolbar. The printer icon sits in the top app bar, on the right side near the project actions.
• Keyboard shortcut. Press Ctrl + P anywhere in the editor (desktop).

Either path drops you into the same flow. Mobile users open the Print button from the toolbar — there's no keyboard shortcut on touch devices.

Step 1 — Pick the print scope

The first thing you see is a small choice dialog: Whole plan or Specific area.

• Whole plan — VisionPlan auto-derives the bounding box from every wall and fixture in the room and frames the print to fit. This is the default for almost every job.
• Specific area — drops you into the print area marquee so you can drag a box around just the part of the drawing you want on the sheet. The Print dialog reopens automatically when you're done picking.

Cancel here closes the flow without printing.

Step 2 — Configure the print

After picking a scope you land in the main Print dialog. The form is organised top-to-bottom:

1. Sections — checkboxes for the floor plan and each of the schedules (door, window, fixture, trim, materials, electrical). See Print dialog sections for what each one contains.
2. Paper — paper size dropdown and a portrait / landscape segmented button. See Paper size, orientation, and scale.
3. Scale — Fit to page, or a fixed architectural / metric ratio.
4. Print Area — only appears when you came in through the marquee flow; lets you re-pick or clear the custom area.
5. Show business info on print — title block identity toggle. The label changes to Show my info on print when you're in Customer mode. See Show business info on print.
6. Drafted in VisionPlan attribution — small credit line in the title block corner. On by default.

Your last-used settings persist per app mode. Reopen the dialog tomorrow and the same sections, paper size, scale, and orientation come back.

Step 3 — Choose how to deliver the output

Two buttons at the bottom of the dialog:

• Print — generates the PDF and hands it to the OS print preview. From there you can pick a printer, adjust copies, then send the job to paper.
• Save as PDF — generates the PDF and triggers a download (desktop) or share sheet (mobile) so you can attach it to email, drop it in a cloud folder, or send via text. The filename uses the project name and today's date — for example KitchenReno_20260601.pdf.

What "Save as PDF" downloads: the rendered PDF — a view-only output of your plan. It's not the editable project file. Sending the PDF to someone else lets them view and print, but not re-open the layout in VisionPlan. If you want to share the editable project itself (so another VisionPlan user can open and edit it), that's a separate flow — file export / .vp / .vps project files — and will land in the Exporting category in a later release.

While the PDF is generating, the dialog form is replaced with a spinner and the message "Preparing your print — rendering the floor plan and assembling schedules…". Large plans with many fixtures and schedules can take several seconds. Don't dismiss the dialog while the spinner is showing.

On mobile, Save as PDF is the primary action — phone print drivers are inconsistent across browsers, and the saved PDF is the more reliable path. The Print button stays available as a secondary option.

Step 4 — Print or save the result

If you tapped Print, the OS preview opens. Pick your printer, adjust if needed, and send.

If you tapped Save as PDF, the download appears in your browser's downloads bar (desktop) or in the system share sheet (mobile). On Chrome desktop, files land in your default Downloads folder.

The Print dialog closes automatically after a successful run. If anything went wrong, an error message appears in a bar at the bottom of the screen and the dialog stays open so you can adjust and retry.

Mobile differences

The print flow on phones and tablets is almost identical to desktop, with a few touch-friendly tweaks:

• The dialog opens as a bottom sheet that takes about 90% of screen height, with the same form fields as desktop.
• Save as PDF is the default primary action; Print sits next to it as a secondary outlined button.
• The shared PDF goes through the OS share sheet — email, messages, cloud drive, etc.
• For the marquee flow, you adjust an auto-prefilled box with corner handles instead of dragging from scratch. See Use the print area marquee.

Tips

• The default paper size is Letter (8.5 × 11 in) and the default orientation is landscape — that combination fits most residential floor plans without needing to switch to Tabloid.
• The default scale is Fit to page, which scales the floor plan to fill the printable area. Switch to a fixed scale (such as 1/4" = 1' / 1:48) when you need a ruler-measurable print.
• The print honours your current layer visibility. If you've turned off auto wall dimensions on the canvas, they'll be off in the print too. See Print layers and visibility.
• The first print after launching the app loads fonts and renders schedules from scratch; subsequent prints in the same session are noticeably faster.
• Layer toggles, watermark state, business info toggle, and your last-used dialog choices all reset cleanly when you switch app modes — Customer and Contractor each keep their own settings.

Related

• Print dialog sections
• Paper size, orientation, and scale
• Use the print area marquee
• Show business info on print