Markups and redlining

Markups are redlines drawn on top of a design — freehand lines, arrows, revision clouds and sticky notes. A redline is a comment on the drawing, not part of the scheme: it never enters the layout, the takeoff or the appraisal.

Opening the markup tools

The ✏️ Markup button sits in the bottom-left corner of the drawing, beside the 🛰 Aerial / 🗺 Street toggle when a map is loaded, with a count when the view already has redlines. Click it to open the toolbar, and the ✕ at the end to hide it again. Redlining needs a design held in the cloud: you get the toolbar on a design opened from your dashboard while signed in, or on a review link, and not on work that lives only in this browser. Anyone who can comment can redline — workspace members, including view-only ones, and guests on a review link that allows comments.

Drawing a redline

Click a tool to arm it — the pointer becomes a crosshair — then draw on the plan. Click the tool again, or press Esc, to put it down. While a tool is armed your clicks go to the markup, not the design, so you cannot nudge the scheme by accident.

• ✏️ Freehand — press and drag to draw a line by hand.
• ↗ Arrow — press where the arrow starts and release where the head should point.
• ☁ Revision cloud — drag round whatever has changed; the loop closes itself and is drawn as a scalloped outline. You are then asked for a revision tag to sit in a box on the cloud — the next unused letter is offered (A, B, C, then 1, 2, 3), or clear it for no tag.
• 🗒 Note — click where you want it and type one line of text. It is drawn as a yellow sticky note outlined in the redline colour; leave the box empty, or cancel it, and nothing is saved.

The buttons show as icons — the names above are their tooltips. With freehand, arrow or cloud, a tap with no movement records nothing. The six swatches set the colour — red, amber, green, blue, purple or black — for the next redline, not the last one.

Where a redline lives

Each redline is tagged with the surface you drew it on, and you see only the ones drawn where you are. There are three kinds of surface: the model, a named sketch view, and sheets. Sheets share a single tag — any view with a paper size counts as "a sheet" rather than as that particular view — so a redline drawn on one sheet shows on all of them. The geometry is held as offsets in metres from an anchor point (a latitude and longitude where the site has a map), so a cloud round a junction stays there when you zoom the map or retype the drawing scale.

Review rounds

Redlines are grouped into rounds. The first one you draw creates a round named Review 1 and every later redline joins it — there is no control yet for starting a second round or for issuing one, so in normal use a design has a single open round. As soon as there is a redline, a drop-down appears in the toolbar:

• Latest round — the default: the newest open round, so an earlier review's clouds are never laid on top of this one's.
• All rounds — every redline on this view.
• Hide redlines — show none, and include none in an export.
• Each round by name. A round that has been issued is listed with (issued) and is frozen: nothing can be added to it and nothing removed.

Clearing redlines

The 🗑 button removes the redlines on screen — exactly the set you are looking at — after a confirmation that counts them. There is no undo, but clearing cannot damage a layout: markups are stored apart from the design. Each redline is recorded against whoever drew it, a member or the named guest on a review link. The button is for members only, and a member may clear anyone's; a guest on a review link gets no clear button at all.

Getting redlines onto an export

Exports leave redlines out unless you ask for them, every time.

• 📄 PDF planning report — a tick-box appears beneath the button when there is something to include, and it names what would go out: Include 3 redlines from “Review 1”. Redlines go on the two layout pages, the colour plan and the sketch plan; the compliance, tracking and site-intelligence pages stay clean. The report steps off any drawing sheet before it captures, so it carries the redlines drawn on the model — one drawn on a sheet stays on the sheet.
• Sheet manager — an Include redline markups tick-box, with a count of what is on screen and the reminder that it is PDF only, never DXF. It only appears when the view you are on has redlines, so open the manager from a view that has them. Every exported sheet then carries the redlines drawn on sheets plus those drawn on the model.

DXF, DWG, PNG and the dashboard thumbnail never carry a redline, whatever is ticked.

Redlines and comments

Markups and 💬 Comments share one permission but are separate. A comment is a pin with a thread and a status — Open, Actioned, Won't do or Resolved; a markup is a mark on the drawing, with nothing to reply to and no status to close. They work best together: cloud the area, then drop a comment beside it saying what is wrong.