Sketch views

The sketch is a drawing, and a practice issues more than one of them: a planning line drawing, a coloured landscape plan, a loose concept sketch. Each is a saved view with its own look — and its own annotations.

Copies

The styling lives on 🎨 Style… in the sketch view bar, not in the label toolbar. Press it on the Master Sketch View and it offers to take a copy first, because the master sheet stays as it is.

Switch to Sketch and a bar appears with the view picker. ⧈ Copy takes a copy of the current view that you can restyle and opens its settings. The first view, Master Sketch View, is the one the app has always made and stays as it is, so “Sketch” means what it always did until you deliberately make another.

What a view controls

• Paper and ink — the sheet colour and the line colour. Each category can then take a line colour of its own (below).
• Hand-drawn line — jitter wobbles the linework and line-end crossing runs the pencil past each corner. The wobble is worked out from the coordinates rather than at random, so the same drawing wobbles the same way every time and two exports of one scheme agree.
• Shading — a drop shadow, with sliders for how far it falls across and down, how soft it is, and how strong. Each element type then has its own shadow tick in the category list, so you can lift the houses off the page while the roads and landscaping stay flat. Turning the master switch off greys them all. Annotation is the one row whose shadow starts off: lettering with a shadow under it reads as a misprint, so tick it only if you want it.
• Lettering — five faces for the sheet’s text: the default drawing sans, an architect’s hand and a looser marker hand for concept and consultation drawings, a condensed technical sans for tight labels, and CAD stick lettering. It sets plot numbers, area names, building and water labels, and any text label you have left on the default font — a label you deliberately gave its own face keeps it. The same faces are in the text label toolbar too, for a single hand-written note on an otherwise clean drawing. The fonts are served from Airship itself, so a sheet reads the same offline, in the iPad app and in an export.
• Show — each element type can be left off a sheet entirely. A landscape drawing with no parking bays, a highways drawing with no houses: tick it off and it is not drawn on that sheet, while every other view keeps it. Hiding a type greys the rest of its row, because its colour, weight and shadow no longer mean anything. It only ever affects the sketch sheet — the 2D plan and the 3D model always show the whole scheme.
• Annotation — its own row in the category list, covering the words and marks on the drawing rather than things on the site: plot numbers, house-type marks, species codes, text and area labels, the north marker and the scale bar. Untick show to issue a clean sheet without them, or tick shadow to give them one. It has no fill or weight, but it does take a line colour, which colours the lettering, leaders, north marker and scale bar — the title block and schedules are part of the sheet and are not affected.
• Colour and weight by category — landscaping, trees, carriageway, street footways, footpaths, houses, existing buildings, water and parking each take a fill colour and a line-weight multiplier. Trees colours the canopies of individual trees as well as woodland areas. A category with no colour set is left as line work, so a view only changes what you tell it to. The master view draws house footprints at 3×, so the buildings read first.
• Line colour by category — every row has a line swatch: the colour that category's line work is drawn in on this sheet, in place of the ink. Set Vehicle routes (indicative) to red on one sheet and that sheet draws its routes red — dashes, corridor edges, diamonds, join rings and the route's name — while every other sheet keeps them in ink. Until you pick a colour the swatch shows the ink, faded; ink beside it puts a row back to the sheet’s ink. See Line colour below for exactly what each row covers.

Line colour

A row’s line colour is an override: a category with none is drawn in the sheet’s ink, exactly as before, so a sheet only changes where you tell it to. It belongs to the view you set it on — copy the view and the copy has the same colours, which you can then change on the copy alone.

• What a row colours. The line work the row shows and hides: its outlines, edges, dashes and marks. Houses includes roof lines, garage doors, plot paving and the bin stores drawn with a house type; Carriageway the kerb, and Street footways the back of the footway, shared drives and their end caps; Water the bank and the inner water lines; Event objects the objects and a ride’s IN / OUT marks.
• Lettering is Annotation’s. Plot numbers, house-type marks, species codes, your own text labels and their leaders, area names (landscaping, water, event zones, existing buildings), the north marker and the scale bar take Annotation’s line colour. The one exception is the name of an indicative vehicle route or pathway, which reads as part of the route (the colour plan draws it in the route’s colour too): it takes the route’s line colour, else Annotation’s.
• Not by category. The site boundary, driveways, car-park islands, fences and walls, the entrance marker, the title block and the schedules have no row of their own, so they stay in the sheet’s ink.
• Everywhere the sheet goes. The colour is on the sketch on screen, the sheets you issue, their PDF and their DXF. In the DXF a line drawn in a row’s colour carries it as its entity colour, so CAD shows a red route red on its usual layer. A DXF names colours from AutoCAD’s standard list of 255, so a custom colour is written as the nearest one in it; red, yellow, green, cyan, blue and magenta are exact. A hidden row stays hidden, whatever its colour.
• It is one step on Undo, and it saves, travels in an .asd file and reaches everyone working on the design with the rest of the view.

The road and path categories

Three rows were added on 20 October 2026, and one was renamed, so that every line-like thing on the drawing answers to a row of its own:

• Street footways — the pavements either side of a street. This is the row that was called Footways; the record on every saved view is unchanged, so a sheet that hid footways still hides them. It was renamed because leaving it beside a new row called Footpaths would have been a riddle.
• Footpaths — the standalone paths through the scheme, drawn with the Path tool. They had no category at all until now, so they could not be hidden, recoloured or reweighted; a view saved before this has nothing recorded for the row, so it shows them, as it always did.
• Trackways (event sites) — a trackway's dashed edges and end caps. Until this row they answered to Footways, so turning footways off on a sheet silently deleted a 3.7 m, 12.5 t vehicle surface from the drawing and from the DXF while the carriageway kerb survived. That was a bug, and this is the fix: an event sheet saved with footways hidden now shows its trackway edges again.
• Pathways (indicative) (event sites) — the dotted lines where nothing is built. Like Annotation and Vehicle routes it starts with its shadow off: a drop shadow under a dotted indication reads as a misprint.
• Privacy screens (event sites, added 21 October 2026) — the dashed line on the screened face of a Heras run with a privacy screen. Untick show to issue a sheet without it, or change its weight; the sheet's DXF follows the row, and the wall & fence schedule's legend drops the line with it. Its shadow starts off, as for the other dashed indications. Hiding the line never removes the screen. A view saved before this row shows the line, as it always did. Above every view's row is the design's own switch, Show privacy screens in the bottom-left corner of the plan: with it off, no 2D view draws the line, whatever its row says. Since 30 October 2026 the row is also offered on a residential or retail site, once the design has a screened run.

Camera view splays

Tick Camera view splays at the foot of a view’s 🎨 Style… settings and that sheet draws what each CCTV tower and CCTV sentry can see: a tinted violet wedge from the camera, pointing the way the camera faces, out to its range, with a thin outline along the edges of the view and a light dashed arc at the range. A camera that sees all round is drawn as a circle. The splay turns with the object when you rotate it. It is off by default and belongs to the one view, so a security sheet can show the splays while your planning sheet does not; the Master Sketch View never shows them.

• Each camera has its own view. On a residential or retail site select the camera and press 📹 Camera view in the bar (or right-click it): set the view angle in degrees, the range in metres and the direction, in degrees clockwise from the way the camera faces. On an event site the same three settings are under ⚙ Parameters. A CCTV tower starts as a multi-head camera seeing all round (360°) to 50 m; a sentry as one forward camera, 60° wide, to 30 m. Defaults puts a camera back.
• Where they go. The splays are on the sketch on screen and in everything made from that sheet: the sheets you issue, their PDF and their DXF, where they are line work on a layer of their own — CCTV_SPLAY, or EVT_SECURITY_SPLAY on an event site — never the junction visibility splays of the road checks. They are hidden with their camera: hide Event objects on a sheet, or view a phase the camera is not on site for, and its splay goes too.
• On an event site they are security material, like the cameras: shown wherever the security layout is shown, and drawn in full in the restricted Security plan, but never in a review or share link, the quote request, a copy to send, or an appendix or DXF exported without its security tick. The Event Safety Plan appendix shows them when its security tick is on and the sketch view you are on has them ticked.

Which sheet an annotation belongs to

Where you write a label decides who sees it. There is one rule and it works in both directions:

• Written on one of your own sketch sheets — it belongs to that sheet alone. It does not appear on the Master Sketch View, on your other sheets, or on the plain 2D plan. This is how a drawing set actually works: the planning drawing and the landscape plan say different things about the same scheme.
• Written on the plain 2D plan or the Master Sketch View — it belongs to the scheme, so it appears on every view, including sheets you copy off later. Site names, road names and anything true of the scheme itself go here once and flow down to every sheet.

The label toolbar shows which you are getting. On one of your sheets a This sheet only tick appears, on by default, and you can turn it off to promote that label to every view. On the plain plan and the master sheet it reads Shows on every view and is greyed, because there is nothing to choose — take a copy of the view first if you want a label that belongs to a single sheet.

Drawing schedules

✍ Annotation → 📋 Schedule… puts a table on the sheet. Five so far, and every one is derived from the scheme — there is nothing to keep in step, and a schedule cannot quietly disagree with the drawing it sits on.

• Plot schedule — plot number, house type, beds, storeys, footprint, GIA, plot area and parking.
• Tree & landscaping schedule — each planting type with its area, and trees counted by species.
• Wall & fence schedule — each style with its height and total length, with an optional legend that draws the run in its own line style.
• Road & footpath schedule — carriageway, shared drives and footway, with widths, lengths and areas.
• On an event site, the event schedules too: event objects, event zones, hire, ride capacity, and the Power schedule and Cable schedule (see Power runs). Those two are offered on a Residential or Retail site as well, for the temporary power of the works.

Drag a schedule anywhere on the sheet. Its place is kept as a proportion of the paper, so it stays put when the viewport locks or the window changes size. Selecting one opens a bar with a tick per column — turn off anything you do not need, and it is left out of the CSV too — plus its width, text size and the legend.

Lock a schedule once it is where you want it — the 🔓 Lock button on its bar, the padlock that appears at its top-right corner while it is selected, or right-click → Lock. A locked schedule cannot be dragged, resized, reconfigured or deleted, so it will not be nudged while you work on the drawing around it: a click still selects it (that is how you unlock it), and a drag that starts on it moves the view instead. Only its place and set-up are pinned — the figures stay live and keep following the scheme. The lock is saved with the project, travels with a copied view, and never appears on an issued sheet.

Column widths. The width slider sizes the whole table. To size one column, select the schedule and drag one of the yellow lines between its columns: width moves between the two columns either side, so the table stays the same overall width. ↔ Even columns puts them all back.

Splitting a schedule. ✂ Split on the bar breaks the selected schedule into two parts, each of which you can drag to its own place on the sheet — a long plot schedule down both sides of the drawing, say. The new part takes the second half of the rows and lands beside the first. Rows on the bar sets how many rows a part holds before the next one takes over, and ↶ Join puts a part back into the one before it. The parts stay one schedule: the rows are still live (a plot added to the scheme appears in the last part), the column ticks, widths, text size and legend change on every part together, the title numbers carry on from part to part, and the total appears once, under the last. Each part can be locked where it is. Delete removes the whole schedule — use Join to remove just one part.

Legends

✍ Annotation → 🗝 Legend… puts a key on the sheet: a titled box with a swatch and a name for each type the drawing shows. Pick one of three: Walls & fences (each wall, fence, panel and hedge style, with a privacy-screened Heras run as its own entry), Roads & footpaths (carriageway, footway, shared drive, trackway, footpath and driveway, and on an event site the indicative vehicle route and pathway), or Landscaping (grass, shrub planting, hedges, tree planting and woodland). An event site adds a fourth, Power cables: the power cable, pedestrian-protected and vehicle-ramp stretches, and the overloaded-source mark (see Power runs); a Residential or Retail site with power runs offers it too. Like a schedule it is derived from the scheme: it lists only the types the design contains, in the schedules’ own words, and a type you add or remove appears or disappears from it by itself.

Each swatch is drawn the way this sheet draws that type. It is painted by the same drawing routine as the plan, on a short run, so whatever the view’s Style settings do to the plan they do to the legend: a line colour, weight, fill or drop shadow set for a category, the hand-drawn line, the paper and ink colours and the lettering font. Turn the vehicle routes red on one sheet and the legend’s vehicle route is red on that sheet only. Roads, footways and paths are drawn to one scale inside the legend, so a carriageway still reads wider than its footway. A category you have hidden on the sheet drops out of its legend — a key to a line the sheet does not draw would mislead — and the legend’s bar says which types it has left out and why. With privacy-screen lines turned off on the sheet, a screened run is keyed as a plain one.

A legend behaves like a schedule in every other way: drag it, size it with the Width and Text controls, drag the yellow line to give the swatch more or less room, Lock it, Split a long one, or press Delete. It is saved with the project, travels with a copied view, is an ordinary undo step, and comes out on issued PDF sheets and in the DXF, where it has a layer of its own, LEGEND, so its swatches are never counted with the real walls or roads. It is a drafting key and nothing more: it is not checked against any standard.

Your own title block Pro

A drawing that leaves the office needs a title block, and every practice’s is different — so you draw your own rather than pick one. Take a copy of a view, then 🗋 Title block… on the view bar.

• Drag on the sheet to draw a cell. Drag a cell to move it, its bottom-right corner to resize, and press Delete to remove it. ▣ Standard layout lays out a conventional block to start from.
• Cells snap to the block’s edges and centre lines and to the edges and centres of every other cell, with a guide line showing what caught. It obeys the same Snap switch as the drawing tools, so turning snapping off on the top bar turns it off here too.
• Each cell takes a label, a value, a text size and an alignment. The value can be typed text, or a field that fills itself in from the scheme.
• Fields — project name, drawing title and number, revision, client, drawn by, date, the scale bar reading, the number of plots and the site area. They stay correct as the scheme changes, so a re-issued drawing does not carry last month’s plot count.
• Set the block’s size and which corner of the sheet it sits in, and add your logo.

Paper size and the viewport

Paper size is in 🎨 Style…, beside paper colour and ink — it belongs to the sheet, not to the title block, so a view can be a sheet before you draw a block on it.

Give the view a paper size — A0 to A4, portrait or landscape, or your own — and the view stops being a window and becomes a sheet. You get the sheet edge, a viewport (what is left once the margin and the title block are taken out), and the block sized in millimetres and placed on the paper rather than pinned to the corner of the screen.

• Unlocked — the sheet is an object you place. Drag it by its margin to move it over the drawing, drag a corner to make it cover more or less ground, or pick a round scale from Scale. A corner drag snaps to the standard scales as it passes them, and the block marks the scale unlocked while it can still change. The sheet only takes hold while you are selecting — with a drawing tool armed (a road, a measurement, an object to place) a click on the margin belongs to the tool, and anything of the drawing’s that sits on the margin — a note, the north arrow, a site corner — is picked before the paper is. Press Esc mid-drag to put the sheet back.
• Locked — the sheet is pinned where it is: it can no longer be dragged or resized, and its scale is fixed. Nothing moves when you lock or unlock — locking only protects the composition. This is the state to be in when the drawing is ready to issue.

Locked or not, pan and zoom move the sheet and the drawing together, so the whole sheet can always be brought into view, and Fit fits the paper to the window. A new sheet starts fitted to your window around whatever you are looking at. Changing the paper size or orientation keeps the scale and the centre — A1 to A3 at 1:500 is still 1:500, looking at the same place. The sheet edge and viewport appear as soon as a paper size is chosen, with or without a title block.

Cells are held as proportions of the block, so resizing the block moves everything with it and a block drawn on one screen lands the same on another. Panels float over the sheet on screen; in an exported PNG or PDF they do not exist, so the block comes through clean.

Issuing the sheets

Once a view has a paper size it is a sheet that can be issued. 🗃 Sheets… on the sketch view bar opens the Sheet manager, which exports any set of sheets to PDF or DXF at the scale each title block sets — and remembers the selection as a drawing group. Pro

Views save with your template, so a house style carries to the next project, and the view you are looking at is part of the scheme, so it is remembered and it undoes — title block included.