Manual Tools

Annotations

Mark up the drawing without affecting quantities: highlights, revision clouds, rectangles, ellipses, circles, lines, arrows, callouts, dimensions, text boxes, and legends.

Steps

1. Open the Annotation menu on the toolbar and point at a category (Text, Shapes, Lines, or Markup) to see its tools.
2. Pick a tool: Text Box (Shift + T), Callout (Shift + K), Rectangle (Shift + R), Ellipse (Shift + E), Circle, Cloud (Shift + C), Line (Shift + I), Arrow (Shift + A), Dimension (Shift + D), Highlight (Shift + H), or Legend (Shift + L).
3. Draw on the canvas: drag to place highlights, clouds, rectangles, ellipses, circles, and text boxes (hold Shift while dragging an ellipse to make it a circle); click two points for a line, arrow, or dimension (the arrowhead goes on the second point).
4. For a callout, click where the arrow points, then drag the text box. The text wraps inside the box, and the box grows to fit.
5. Press Escape to step back out (finish editing, then deselect, then return to the Select tool).

Notes

• •Annotations never change your takeoff quantities.
• •Undo, Redo, and the Edit menu work on annotations too.
• •The Print dialog (printer icon on the toolbar) has an Annotations checkbox under Include, so you can keep them in or leave them out of the downloaded PDF. Export PDF (all sheets) includes them.
• •Delete or Backspace removes selected annotations when no measurement is selected.