You can adjust the size and placement of floating viewports and the views they contain. For plotting, the borders of floating viewports can be turned off.
For increased performance in large drawings, you can also turn off the views in selected viewports and limit the number of active viewports.
After you insert floating viewports, you can rearrange them in paper space according to your needs. You can snap to, copy, scale, stretch, erase, and move viewports using standard commands and most grip modes. To use these commands, you must be in paper space, and the viewport borders must be visible.
When you scale a view within a viewport, you might need to resize the viewport. Scaling or stretching the viewport border does not change the scale of the view within the viewport, as shown below.
By resizing the viewport borders, you can clip the view to display only a specific section of the drawing.
Because floating viewports are objects, you can use ERASE to remove them from the paper space layout.
Floating viewports are objects that are created on layers, like any other object. Turning off the contents of a viewport does not hide the viewport border. If you want to hide the viewport borders as you work or when you plot, use a special layer for creating viewports and then turn off or freeze that layer. To turn the viewport itself on or off, viewport borders must be visible.
Displaying a large number of active floating viewports can affect performance: each additional active viewport slows down your system's ability to regenerate the drawing. You can improve drawing speed by turning off some viewports temporarily or by limiting the number of active viewports. The illustration below shows the effects of turning off two viewports.
A floating viewport is considered to be active when it is on, visible in the graphics area, and not part of a block reference. (Viewports contained in blocks do not display model space views.)
Your drawing can contain an unlimited number of viewports. However, the number of viewports that are active is limited by the maximum value set by the MAXACTVP system variable (48). Lowering this limit can improve performance because inactive viewports are blank and their contents are not regenerated.
The limit you set has no effect on the number of viewports that can be plotted from paper space. Floating viewports need not be active to be plotted. You can use MVIEW to turn on viewports that are blank because the active viewport limit has been exceeded, but this activity turns off other viewports.