Plot numbers, house type marks, text labels & tags

The Annotation menu (✍, in the palette) holds four tools for labelling your drawing: plot numbering, house type marks, free text labels and tags that read what they point at.

Number plots (🔢)

Automatically numbers every plot. A panel lets you set the position of numbers, the starting number, whether to skip 13, and to auto-number or clear. Numbers follow the street order.

House type marks (🔠)

Shows each house's type mark — a short code, up to two characters — on its footprint, so a reader can tell the types apart without matching colours. Selecting the tool switches the marks on and opens a panel where you choose:

• Corner — bottom-left (the default), bottom-right, top-left or top-right of the footprint, read on the sheet rather than relative to the house, so every mark on the drawing sits the same way round.
• Font scale — how prominent the marks are.
• Auto-scale — off (the default), a mark takes a real size on the plan and grows and shrinks with the drawing, which is what you want for a PDF or DXF issue at a set scale. On, it stays the same size on screen at any zoom, like a screen label. Same option as a text label.

Each mark is aligned to its own house — it turns and hands with the building, so it reads as a label on the footprint rather than one dropped near it. Where the frontage would set it back to front it turns through 180° so it stays readable.

The panel also lists what every type is currently marked as.

Set a type's mark in the Mark box on its card in 4 · House types, or in the house builder. Leave it blank and the mark is the first two characters of the type name — so Wakefield 2B4P shows as WA and Berwick as BE. Marks are always shown in capitals.

Text label (🔤)

Places free text anywhere on the 2D plan or sketch. When you add a label you can choose:

• Font — pick from the font selector.
• Size — defaults to 12; change per label.
• Leader — when ticked, your first click sets the leader target and the second click places the text, with a leader line drawn between them. The leader attaches at the left or right edge of the text at mid-height, never behind it, and you can add a draggable elbow. With leader off, a single click places the text.
• Justification — centred, left or right. The label’s point stays put and the text grows from it, so right-justifying notes that sit to the left of what they point at lines their right edges up down the sheet. The leader always meets the side of the block facing it.
• Several lines — a label can be as many lines as you need. Press Enter in the text box for a new one. The block stays centred on its point, and the leader attaches to the side of the whole block rather than the first line.
• Editing in place — double-click the words on the plan and the caret lands in the text where it sits, in its own font and size, instead of in a box at the bottom of the screen. What you type appears on the drawing as you go, so the leader and the outline follow the text as it grows. Esc throws the edit away; clicking elsewhere, or Ctrl/Cmd+Enter, keeps it.
• Auto-scale — keep the label a fixed size on screen, or let it scale with the drawing.

Double-click a label to reopen its editor and change the text or options.

Tag object (🏷)

A tag is a label with no words of its own. Pick Annotation ▸ 🏷 Tag object and click a house, a road, a footpath, a library object, a tree or plant, a fence, wall or hedge, a parking space, a driveway, a pond, a landscaped area, an event zone or object, or (on a retail site) the store. A label appears with its leader tip on the object, and the words are read from the object every time the drawing is drawn — rename the house type, renumber the plot, change the fence style or re-specify the plant and the tag says the new thing. Right-clicking an object offers Tag this object as well.

• Line one is the object's name: the house type, Road or Footpath, the library object's name, the plant's botanical name, the fence style, the pond's label, the zone's label.
• Line two — the Sub heading, which you can switch off per tag in the bar — carries the object's mark where it has one and its key figure: Plot 12 · WA · 3 bed for a house, the planting schedule's code for a plant, the wall & fence schedule's W1/F1 reference with the height and length, the landscape schedule's L1, a road's width and length, an area's size. The marks are the same numbering the schedules print, so a tag on the plan matches the schedule on the sheet.
• A tag follows its object: move or rotate the house and the tag goes with it; reshape a road and the tip slides onto the new line. Drag the tip onto another object to re-tag it; drop it on empty ground and it returns to the object it had.
• Delete the object and the tag shows its last words in grey with a ⚠ — a question on screen, never a note on a drawing: an orphaned tag is left out of every DXF and sheet export. Delete it, or drag its tip onto something else.

Ref only. Tick Ref only in the tag bar and a tag shows just the object's mark — Plot 12 · WA, an object's mark, C03 or SF01 (see Object marks), an event zone's Z2, the wall & fence schedule's F1, a plant code or T1, a landscape area's L1, a pond's short code — centred on the object, with no leader and no second line. An object that has no mark (a road, a driveway, a parking space, a car park, an existing building, a plain library object) shows its name instead. The ref sits at the middle of a house or object, half way along a fence, road or path, and at a point inside an area (never off the edge of an L-shaped one); where the plan already prints the area's own name or the plot number there, it starts one line above it. It follows the object when the object moves or is reshaped, and you can drag the words aside. In Edit, a click on a house or object goes to that object even where a ref covers it — double-click the ref, or use the Tag tool, to select or drag the ref itself. With nothing selected the tick decides how your next tags are made; with a tag selected it switches that tag (one undo step), and right-clicking a tag offers Ref only / Full tag too.

Tag all. While the Tag tool is on, the bar has a category list and a Tag all button. The list shows only what this site has, with counts: houses, event objects (and each of their categories, such as Welfare or Structures), library objects (and their categories), trees and plants, event zones, landscaped areas, fences and barriers, roads and paths, driveways, parking aisles, parking spaces, car parks, existing buildings, water and the store. Tag all puts one tag on every object in the category that has no tag yet, using the settings in the bar (Ref only, sub heading, font, size, auto-scale). Objects that already have a tag are skipped — on a copied sheet, a tag on that sheet; on the plan or the master sheet, a tag on any sheet, because a tag made there shows on every sheet — and so is anything the viewed phase or the security key hides, or that this sheet does not draw. A panel run (Heras, pit barrier) is tagged once, as a fence; clicking one of its panels with the Tag tool tags the run too. It is one undo step, and a message says how many were tagged.

In every other way a tag is a text label: the same font, size, justification, leader elbow, auto-scale and per-sheet options, the same drag, and the same Delete. It cannot be typed into. Double-click (or double-tap) a tag — its words, its leader tip or elbow, or anywhere along its leader — to select it with its bar, from any tool and even in a view-only session, to look at it. While you are drawing a fence, road, path or area, a double-click finishes it instead, wherever it lands. Double-clicking a tag never makes a second one.

The label and tag bar can be moved: drag it by its title (✥) or any gap between its controls and it stays where you put it next time. Double-click the title to put it back at the bottom of the screen.

Turning a label or tag

Select a text label or a tag and move the pointer just outside a corner of its dashed box — past the small square that resizes it — and a round ⟲ rotate handle and a rotate cursor appear. Drag it to turn the words about the middle of the box; the angle shows beside the pointer, and holding Shift steps it in 15°. Double-click the handle (or right-click the label ▸ Reset rotation) to stand it level again. [ and ] turn the selected label 5° at a time (15° with Shift), and the ⟲ box in the label bar and on the Edit bar takes an exact angle, in degrees anticlockwise. A tag's leader still runs from its object to the nearest point of the turned box, and turned labels print turned on every sheet, PDF and DXF. In Edit's Rotate mode, dragging a label's words turns it too.

On an iPad there is no hovering, so the handle is always shown, off the corner of the box farthest from the tag's leader (off the top-right corner of a label with no leader): drag it to turn the label, and double-tap it to stand it level. The other corners' squares resize, as before. The same handle answers a trackpad or a mouse on an iPad: the rotate cursor shows only over that handle, and the resize cursor over the squares, so the pointer always shows what a press there will do. In Edit, the ⟲ and ⟳ buttons on the bottom bar turn the selected label 5° at a time (they are not offered in the label and tag tools), and with ∠15° on a drag on the handle steps in 15°.

Selecting several labels and tags

Ctrl-click labels and tags (⌘-click on a Mac) to add them to the selection, and Ctrl/⌘-click a selected one again to take it out — in Edit, alongside houses, objects and fences, and in the label and tag tools. Shift-click does not add: Shift steps a turn in 15° and locks a drag to an axis, as it does everywhere else. In the label and tag tools a Ctrl/⌘-click on empty ground places nothing, so the selection you are building stays. On an iPad, turn on ⊕ Multi in the bottom bar and tap to add or remove; while it is on, a tap (or a hold) on empty ground in the label or tag tool never places a new one.

A selection box dragged across empty ground in Edit picks up every text label and tag it touches, as well as the objects it encloses — except a Ref only mark. A ref is the mark of the object it sits on, so the box takes it exactly when it takes that object: a box that encloses a house takes its ref, and a box that only crosses a neighbouring house takes neither the house nor its ref. A ref on a road, a path or an area (which a box never takes) is added with Ctrl/⌘-click. In Edit, a Ctrl/⌘-click on a house, an object or a parking space under its Ref only mark goes to the house, object or space, as it always has; it adds the ref itself only while what is selected so far is labels and tags alone.

Drag any member to move them all, press Delete to remove them all, and copy and paste them together; each is one undo step. A tag whose object is in the selection moves with it, leader and all; one whose object is not keeps its tip where it is and moves only its words. Turning a selection ([ ], or Edit's Rotate mode) carries each label round about the middle of its words and keeps it readable: a label that would end up past upright is flipped round instead, in place, and a Ref only mark keeps its own angle on its object. A label in a selection is framed by the selection's outline, not its own dashed box: it shows no resize squares, rotate handle or leader handles, because a drag anywhere on it moves the whole selection — to work on it alone, clear the selection first (in Edit, click empty ground; in any tool, click a label or tag that is not in it) and then click it. With labels selected, the Edit bar and the label bar change every one of them at once — text size, auto-scale, sub heading, Ref only, rotation (and in the label bar the font, alignment, wrap, leader and elbow) — and show mixed where they differ.

In a view-only session you can still select to look: Ctrl/⌘-click (or ⊕ Multi) adds labels and tags to a selection, and the bars show what they hold, but nothing in it can be moved, turned, changed or deleted.