Use the Print Area Marquee

By default, VisionPlan prints the whole drawing — auto-derived bounding box around every wall and fixture. The print area marquee is the override: you draw a box on the canvas and only what falls inside gets printed. The rest of the plan is excluded from the floor plan section for that print run.

This is useful for printing individual rooms off a whole-floor plan, isolating a kitchen detail for a cabinet supplier, or cropping out an in-progress addition you don't want on a client review sheet.

When to use it

Reach for the marquee when:

• You want a room-by-room set of sheets from one project (one room per print run).
• The auto-bound print frames more area than you need and the floor plan ends up too small to read.
• You're producing a detail crop (kitchen run, bathroom wet wall) for a specific trade.
• You want to print just one wing of a larger plan without temporarily deleting the rest.

For most jobs the whole-plan default is the right answer — only reach for the marquee when the auto-bound is wasting space or showing the wrong things.

Start the marquee

Two paths in:

1. From the scope prompt — open the Print dialog (toolbar button or Ctrl + P), then pick Specific area in the What would you like to print? dialog. This is the cleanest start.
2. From inside the Print dialog — if you picked Whole plan but then want to switch, the Print Area section in the dialog has a Select area on plan button that drops you into the marquee. This path is always available on every dialog open from the editor.

On desktop, you can also press Esc while the marquee is active to cancel and return to whole-plan.

Either way, the dialog closes (or yields control), and the marquee overlay takes over the canvas.

Desktop — drag to draw

On desktop the canvas dims slightly and a banner at the top reads "Drag on the plan to select print area".

1. Click and drag from one corner of the area you want to print, to the opposite corner. A rectangle appears with a bright outline; everything outside the rectangle is dimmed.
2. Release. The rectangle commits.
3. The banner switches to "Drag to redraw, or press Done to confirm". You can drag a new rectangle to start over, or press the Done button in the bottom-right of the screen.

Bottom action bar:

• Cancel — abort the marquee without changing anything. The Print dialog reopens with whatever print area was set before.
• Reset — clear the current rectangle so you can draw again from scratch.
• Done — commit the rectangle and reopen the Print dialog with the new area set.

The cursor changes to a precision cursor while the overlay is active to make it clear the canvas is in marquee mode.

Mobile — adjust a pre-filled box

On mobile the marquee starts pre-filled with a box covering the auto-derived plan extent, so you have something to adjust instead of drawing from scratch.

1. Four circular handles appear at the corners of the box. Drag a handle to resize from that corner.
2. Drag the body of the box (anywhere inside the corners) to move it without resizing.
3. Single-finger drag outside the box still pans the canvas — the marquee only owns the rectangle and its handles, not the whole screen.
4. The minimum box size is small (around 50 mm); the handles snap to that limit if you try to drag past it so you can always grab them back.

Bottom action bar:

• Cancel — abort.
• Done — commit.

The handles are sized for touch (44 pt). The corners use a dark / light styling so they're visible on top of any underlying canvas content.

What "inside the area" means

The marquee uses your selected rectangle as the floor plan bounding box. Entities that fall inside print; entities that fall outside don't appear on the printed floor plan.

A few rules to know:

• Walls count as inside when either endpoint or the wall's midpoint is inside the rectangle. So a long wall that crosses through the box but whose endpoints are both outside will still print — the midpoint catch keeps long boundary walls in.
• Fixtures count as inside when their center is inside the rectangle. A cabinet whose corner pokes outside the box still prints if its center is inside.
• Openings, dimensions, annotations follow the walls / fixtures they're attached to.

The schedule sections (door, window, fixture, etc.) are NOT filtered by the marquee — they still list every entity in the project, not just what fell inside the box.

The empty-area check

If you draw a box but no walls or fixtures fall inside it, VisionPlan catches the mistake and prompts before printing:

Empty print area — No walls or fixtures fall inside the selected area. Do you want to print it anyway?

Three choices:

• Cancel — close the whole flow.
• Adjust area — stay in the marquee so you can move or resize the box.
• Print anyway — print the empty area. You'll get a blank floor plan with just the title block.

The empty check fires on commit, not as you drag, so the dragging itself stays responsive.

What the dialog shows after marquee

After you press Done, the Print dialog reopens with a new Print Area section visible:

• Label reads "Custom area set (W × H mm)" with the dimensions of the rectangle.
• A small Clear button next to the label reverts to whole-plan.
• A Reselect area on plan button to redo the marquee.

The custom area sticks for that one print run. As soon as you close the dialog, the print area is cleared — so the next print starts fresh with the whole-plan default unless you marquee again. This is intentional: it prevents a forgotten area selection from quietly cropping a future print.

How the area interacts with scale

When you pick a fixed scale (1/4" = 1', etc.) with a print area set, the area is what gets scaled — not the whole plan. So a smaller marquee gives you a larger image of that area on the sheet, because there's less drawing to fit at the chosen scale.

When you pick Fit to page with a print area set, VisionPlan fits the marquee to the printable area on the sheet. Same logic as whole-plan Fit, just with the marquee as the bounding box.

Tips

• For room-by-room sheets, draw the marquee around one room at a time, print, then come back and marquee the next room. Each print is its own run; no setting carries over between runs.
• The marquee uses world coordinates — if you pan or zoom the canvas after picking the area, the rectangle stays anchored to the plan, not to the screen. So you can pan around to verify the bounds before committing.
• The mobile pre-fill assumes you want to crop in from the whole plan extent. If you want to print a small detail, drag the corners aggressively inward before tapping Done.
• The desktop dimmer outside the rectangle is subtle on purpose so you can still see the surrounding context while you're selecting. The contrast strengthens once you commit.
• A marquee rectangle is purely a print thing — it doesn't hide anything on the editor canvas. After Done, the canvas looks the same as before; only the next print is affected.

Related

• How to print a plan
• Paper size, orientation, and scale
• Print layers and visibility