The scale in a Dato Room

In a Dato Room the scale of each page belongs to the room, and the host sets it. Two people measuring the same wall to two different scales would get two different answers, and a take-off that adds them up would be wrong with nobody able to say whose number to trust. So there’s one scale, and every page takes it.

What you see

1. The status bar reads 1 : 100 · room when the scale came from the room. Hover over it to see who set it.
2. A guest's page takes the host's scale the moment they arrive, in the unit the host chose (so a building reads in metres on every screen), even before there’s a single mark.
3. When the host changes it, everybody is told once, with who did it. Nothing else interrupts them.

If you aren’t the host

Pressing Set the scale tells you who sets it, what this page is at and what it was set from, and offers to open the room chat so you can ask. It never lets you draw a different scale, because that’s the one thing that would make your measurements disagree with everybody else's. Everything else about measuring is yours as usual.

If you’re the host

Set the scale as you always do. It’s shared the moment it’s set, and Undo takes it back for everybody. Measurements already made keep the scale they were taken under: nobody's quantities are rewritten behind their back. After you set a new scale, the message offers Update them to this scale, one step that brings them across for everybody and that Undo reverses.

If you hand the room to somebody else, the scale stays as it is and the new host can change it. Only the host's setting counts: the service itself refuses a scale from anybody else.

Walk-throughs never touch the room

A walk-through always practises on a sheet of its own (its name ends in (practice)), even if the room is on the sample drawing, so nothing it draws and no scale it sets reaches the room.