About the Prepare Layout Command

The tools are available in a context toolbar that appears when you click Prepare Layout from the Formboard section of the action bar.

By default, the selected tool is Rotate and the selection mode is the Local mode . If you already used the Prepare Layout command, the last tool and selection mode used are proposed.

The available selection modes are:

• Punctual mode
• Local mode
• Global mode

The following table shows which selection mode can be chosen for each tool:

	Rotate	Roll	S-Shape Roll	Arrange Junction	Scale	Straighten	Loop Close	Branch Recompute	Mirror Layout
Punctual	Segment (multi-selection)	Segment	Segment	Segment	Not available	Portion of Branch selection	Not available	End devices connected to a branch	Not available
Local	Branch (multi-selection)	Branch	Branch	Branch	Branch	Branch	Branch	Not available	Branch
Global	Junction	Not available	Not available	Not available	Not available	Not available	Network	Not available	Not available

When the Perform clash detection check box, available in Me > Preferences > App Preferences > 3D Modeling > Electrical and Electronic Systems > Electrical Mfg Preparation > Formboard expander is selected, all the clashes between devices, supports, branches, and tables in the flattened data are displayed as red dots. You can manipulate the data to make it clash free. For more information, see Detecting and Resolving Clashes in the Laid-Out Data.

When you use the prepare layout tools, the Table Management option enables space visualization thanks to the display of bounding boxes.

This option is available in Me > Preferences > App Preferences > 3D Modeling > Electrical and Electronic Systems > Electrical Mfg Preparation > Formboard expander. For more information, see Bounding box dimension.

When the option is selected:

• The content is reoriented and the backbone of the formboard data is aligned with the x-axis.
• Two boxes appear: the layout bounding box and the space bounding box.

  Box	Color	Description
  Layout bounding box		Displays the space occupied by the generated layout. Its dimensions are based on the actual size of your content. Thus, when you manipulate the content, the dimensions of the box are updated accordingly.
  Space bounding box		Displays the space allocated to the content manufacturing. Its dimensions can be customized in your preferences.

	The space bounding box appears at the offset of 150 mm from the extreme left end of the backbone.
	The space bounding box is placed such that the extreme left end of the backbone is at the centre of the width.

The bounding boxes guide you during manipulations to ensure that the generated layout fits in the space allocated to the manufacturing. When the manipulations are done, the layout bounding box should fit into the space bounding box.