Civil Designer has a number of tools that you can use to create and print your drawing.
Drawing space is the area you draw in. It works in the chosen drawing units and scale that you have set up in the Drawing Settings.
While drawing space displays a paper border, you are not limited to drawing within that border. With the help of viewports, you can extract views or portions of your drawing and place them onto one or more layouts at your chosen position, scale and rotation.
Viewports are windows into your drawing; and a layout is effectively the sheet of paper that you ultimately print.
Think of drawing space as the area where you construct your model or the object you are drawing, and a layout as the final print or series of prints. Each layout can include one or more viewports, each with its own scale and rotation.
Earlier versions of Civil Designer only worked with drawing space and used a layer magnification factor in order to have different scales. The problem with this system was that your dimensions were incorrect if they were not created in the magnified layer.
On the other hand, drawing space always works in your designated scale so your dimensions are always correct. If you want to include a detail at a different scale on your print, you insert a viewport into the layout at the chosen scale.
Take a typical house plan as an example. In order to provide the contractor with all the information he requires, we need to include a plan of the house at a scale of 1:100 as well as the elevations. We also need to include various notes, and possibly even magnified details at a scale of 1:20.
You would draw the house layout in plan and elevation views in the drawing space. In this example, there are four elevations and a section at the bottom right.
All drawing elements are created and maintained in the drawing space, regardless of whether they fit on to the paper extents or not.
The plan views are not within the paper extents but just next to them on the right.
The notes for the title block are to the left of the paper extents.
The legend of your electrical layout is also included in the drawing space.
So how do you place these entities on our layout, which is ultimately what we will print? The solution is to use viewports, which you place onto one or more layouts.