Annotations, measuring and layers

A layout is a set of positions. A drawing is a layout somebody can build from: it carries the dimensions that matter, the labels that name things, a north arrow, a scale, and the notes that explain the parts a plan view cannot show. The annotation tools in Sketch Mode are how you turn the first into the second without leaving the application.

Annotations are drawing content. They do not clear ground, they are not counted in the plant totals, and they never change the capacity — that is the difference between them and the plant objects on Sketch Mode. What they do is travel: onto the screen, and into the exported CAD drawing on a layer of their own. The one exception is a line drawn with a width, below, which does clear ground.

Getting to the tools

Click Sketch in the Layout view's tools. Every tool on this page is in the same palette as the editing tools — the DRAW, ANNOTATE, MODIFY SELECTION, IMPORT & CLEAR and COMMAND groups — and one tool is active at a time.

Each element you draw is created on the active layer, in the current stroke colour, and can be put into a group. The default stroke is an orange-red, 1.5 pt wide; 🎨 Colour on the contextual bar above the plot changes it for what you draw next.

Drawing shapes

The DRAW group shows four tools, with four more behind the More shapes expander. The multi-point tools all end the same way — right-click or double-click.

Three of those deserve a note.

╱ Line and ⌒ Polyline ask for a width. Enter 0 and you get a line only — an annotation like any other. Enter more than 0 and the line becomes a corridor of that width that removes the tables under it, the same model as the 🚧 Road tool. It is the way to clear an irregular strip — a drain, a track that bends — that a straight road centre-line cannot describe.

◜ Arc takes three clicks in a specific order — start, end, then a point the arc must pass through. The arc is not drawn until the third click, so nothing appears to happen after the first two.

▨ Fill/Zone is a filled polygon of its own. Click its corners and finish with a right-click. It is the tool for marking out a phase, a contractor's work area, or a land parcel that is not an exclusion.

Switch ⊾ Ortho on before drawing anything that has to run square, and leave 🧲 Snap on — it is on by default — for anything that has to meet existing geometry exactly.

Typing a point instead of clicking it

The numeric entry on the contextual bar replaces the second click of any tool. Click a start point, then type into the bar and press Enter:

That is how a boundary offset, a fence setback or a trench of a known length goes onto the drawing at its real dimension rather than at a guess.

Text labels

🅣 Text places a label. Click where the label goes and an Add text prompt takes the text — it accepts more than one line, so a note does not have to be a single long string — and the label sits at that position on the plot.

To reposition a label, switch to ↖ Move and drag it. Labels select, move and delete like any other element.

Text is the tool that carries the things the geometry cannot say: a plot name, a phase number, an access route, a caveat about a survey. Write them as they should read on the printed drawing, because that is where they end up.

Measuring

📏 Measure answers a question; it does not add anything to the drawing and nothing it shows is saved.

Each click snaps to corners, edge midpoints and centres of what is already on the plot, so a measurement between two tables is between the tables, not between two points near them. Esc clears the measurement.

The bearing on a two-point measurement is what makes this useful for setting out — it is the number you hand to a surveyor along with the distance. The area is for the questions a plan view raises: how much ground a phase covers, or the size of the parcel a fence encloses.

All internal geometry is in metres, projected to the site's local UTM zone, so a measurement is a ground distance, not a screen distance. Zooming does not change it.

Dimensions

📐 Dimension places a dimension that stays on the drawing: click and drag between the two points, or click a start point and then type a length into the numeric entry. It is saved with the project, redrawn with the plot and exported to the CAD drawing.

The distinction between the two tools is worth being deliberate about:

Dimension the things a construction team would otherwise have to derive: row pitch, the gap between table runs, the setback from the fence to the first row, the clearance around a control room. Those are the numbers that get queried on site.

Modifying a selection

The MODIFY SELECTION group acts on whatever is currently selected with ↖ Move, and stays greyed out until a selection exists that it can act on.

A group moves as one. Select the elements that belong together — a dimension and the label that explains it, an outline and its fill — group them, and from then on ↖ Move picks up the whole thing. Ungroup when you need to change one part. Groups are independent of layers: an element carries a layer and, optionally, a group, and grouping elements does not move them onto a layer of their own.

Layers

Layers control what is visible on screen. The three layer controls sit on the contextual bar above the plot, not in the palette:

Create the layer first and then draw. The habit that pays off is one layer per audience — dimensions on one, civil notes on another, a client's mark-ups on a third — because then you can show one and hide the rest instead of deleting anything.

Your own layers stay in the application

The exported CAD drawing separates the plant from the annotations. Boundaries, tables, control rooms, inverters, cables and trenches each land on their own layer; every Sketch Mode annotation lands on the single SKETCH layer, whatever in-application layer it was drawn on, and labels and text land on ANNOTATIONS. Three layers of working come out as one.

That separation is still what makes the drawing usable by somebody else. A civil contractor opens the file, switches off SKETCH and ANNOTATIONS, and has a clean plan of the plant with none of your working on it. But layers you create with ＋ are a tool for the screen — for hiding your own working to read the layout underneath, and for keeping a client's mark-ups apart from your dimensions — not a way to hand structured layers to somebody else. If the recipient needs that separation in CAD, it has to be rebuilt there. See CAD export.

Bringing an existing drawing in

📂 Import DXF brings a CAD drawing onto the canvas so you can draw against it — an existing site plan, a survey, a road alignment, a neighbouring developer's drawing. It is a reference to work over, not an input to the layout: importing a drawing does not create obstructions and does not move any tables.

The drawing's coordinates are read as they are, in project metres. Nothing is scaled, re-centred, or fitted to the plant, so the drawing has to already be in the same coordinate system as the project.

Seven entity types come across: lines, polylines, circles, arcs, ellipses, splines and text. Anything else in the file is skipped. The elements land on the active layer and are editable like anything you drew, and the status line reports how many came in and onto which layer — so pick or create that layer before importing.

To turn something in an imported drawing into ground the layout must avoid, draw it as a road, a corridor or an obstruction. See Obstructions.

The scale bar and north arrow

🧭 Scale bar + N switches a metric scale bar and a north arrow on and off together. They belong on anything that leaves the application as a picture — Export ▾ Export Image (PNG), a drawing handed to somebody who was not part of the design.

The project report draws its own north arrow and title block on the site layout plan, so you do not need this for the report itself. See The project report.

Clearing annotations

🗑 Clear Annotations removes the annotation elements in one action.

Plant objects are not annotations, so clearing annotations does not remove tables, arresters, roads or trenches. Those are deleted with 🗑 Delete and ✂ Del Trench.

Working from the keyboard

The COMMAND line at the foot of the palette takes typed aliases. If you draft in CAD every day, it is faster than finding a button: type the alias, press Enter, and the tool is armed. Its placeholder lists them: "cmd: L PL REC C ARC EL SPL H DIM RO SC MI O AR ↵".

The aliases are the ones a CAD user already has in their fingers, so a drafting session runs at keyboard speed: PL, click the vertices, right-click, DIM, drag, T, type the note. The full keyboard reference is in Keyboard and commands.

What to put on a drawing you hand over

The tools are general, so the useful question is which of them a recipient actually needs. This is the set that answers the questions a design drawing gets asked on site.

Keep each of those on a layer that says who it is for, and the same drawing serves the client, the civil contractor and the electrical contractor without being redrawn three times.

Where to go next