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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Colour and weight by category — landscaping, trees, carriageway, footways, 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.

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. Four 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.

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 — plus its width, text size and the legend.

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 re-fitted to your window all the time, so the viewport fills the screen and you pan and zoom the drawing inside it, as usual. The scale changes as you zoom, and the block says so.
• Locked — the sheet is pinned to the drawing. Zooming now scales everything together: paper, viewport, title block and layout, at a fixed scale, exactly as moving a real sheet closer would. This is the state to be in when you are composing a drawing to issue.

Unlocking snaps back so the viewport fits the screen again, still showing what the viewport was showing. Changing the paper size or orientation unlocks, because a frozen sheet was sized for the old paper.

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.