Easy Zone Plans v1.3.3: copy and paste, autosave and faster plan building

Version 1.3.3 is now available. This release makes everyday editing quicker, adds autosave to evacuation plans and fixes several issues with rotated pages and exported drawings. Here is what has changed and what to check when opening an existing project.

Copy and paste between floors

Select an item and press Ctrl+C, then Ctrl+V to paste it. Hold Shift and click to select more than one item, so you can copy, paste or delete a group together.

Paste onto another page and the items land in the same position, making it easier to reuse a layout between floors. Paste onto the same page and the copy is offset from the original so you can tell them apart. Dragging still moves one item at a time.

Move walls without fighting the zone shading

Walls can now be selected and moved. A selected wall, door or staircase appears above the zone shading while you work, so it can be dragged even where a zone covers it.

Evacuation plans now autosave

Evacuation plans now autosave every minute, just as zone plans already did. If the app closes unexpectedly, it offers to recover your unsaved work the next time you open it.

You will also notice a clearer name: Egress plans are now called Evacuation plans throughout the app. Existing plans still open as before and keep their .faep files.

Masks that look the same on screen and in your PDF

Previously, a mask could hide walls, doors and stairs on screen while those items still appeared on top of it in the exported PDF. Masks now print the way they look on screen.

Important for existing projects: if your plan relied on walls, doors or stairs printing above a mask, select Advanced → Masks Under Walls, Doors and Stairs before exporting it again.

The new Advanced menu sits between Edit and View. This setting is saved with each project and starts unticked for new projects.

Adjust the grid on any page

Grid size is no longer limited to blank pages. Click an empty part of the page and look for the Grid section in the properties panel; the control has moved there from Page Setup.

On blank pages, grid size remains in metres, and you can still choose it when adding the page. On imported PDFs, it is set in millimetres on the sheet. That is a page measurement, not a real-world scale: an imported plan has no scale the app can measure from.

Smaller symbols and labels

Size sliders now go down to 10% for symbols, the fire panel, north arrows, beam detectors, aspirating pipes, You Are Here markers and zone labels on Build Zone Plan. Text labels can go down to 1px, both on the plan and on the build page, giving you more control over crowded drawings.

Faster build pages, with the same print quality

Build Zone Plan and Build Evacuation Plan open much faster. The page list on the left is now rendered at its displayed size rather than at full print quality. What you place on the sheet, and what prints, is unchanged.

Fixes for rotation, numbering and evacuation plans

• Doors and stairs rotate with the page. They no longer stay pointing in their previous direction while the walls turn. A door already knocked out of line by an earlier rotation needs correcting once.
• Rotated-page editing is more reliable. Door openings now cut through walls correctly, selecting doors or stairs through zone shading works, and two-click beam detectors point where you place them.
• Renumbered zones stay consistent. Build Zone Plan and the exported PDF now show the updated zone number, matching the legend.
• Delete works on selected evacuation-plan walls. The Delete key now removes them as expected.
• New evacuation plans start blank. Starting one from the Home screen no longer reopens the last plan instead.