Group Appearance

Why appearance is worth setting

Colour is how you read a takeoff. Give each service its own colour and a glance at the drawing tells you what has been counted and what has not. Opacity decides how much of the drawing shows through, which matters when you are checking a marker actually sits on the symbol underneath it. And border width keeps markers visible on a busy sheet without burying it.

The colour you choose also carries through to the swatch column of the Excel quantities export and to PNG and PDF exports of the drawing, so it is worth settling on a scheme early.

Opening the appearance popover

1. 1

   In the sidebar, click the colour swatch at the left of the group's row. On a Detection group this is the symbol thumbnail rather than a plain swatch.

2. 2

   The popover opens with the colour grid at the top, sliders below it, and Cancel and Apply at the bottom.

3. 3

   Make your changes. They preview on the drawing as you go, but nothing is saved yet.

4. 4

   Click Apply. It only becomes active once something has actually changed.

You can also reach the same popover from the drawing: select a marker and click Group settings in the action menu beside it.

Choosing a colour

The grid holds eleven preset colours plus a Custom color cell at the end. Click a preset to select it, or click the custom cell to open your operating system's colour picker and enter any colour you like — a hex code, a value from a picker, or a colour sampled from elsewhere on screen. The custom cell shows a rainbow gradient while a preset is selected.

The sliders

Which sliders you get depends on the group's type. Every slider shows its current number on the right.

Width is the outline thickness of each marker — the box around a detection, the line of a Linear run, the outline of an annotation shape. Size on a Count group is the diameter of the dot, which is why its range runs so much higher; a dot has no interior to see through and needs to be large enough to spot.

Manual Detection Width and Manual Detection Opacity only appear on a Detection group that contains dots you placed by hand with the button. They control those dots alone, so you can make hand-added counts stand out from, or blend in with, the automatically found boxes.

Area groups have no width slider. An Area marker is read by its fill, so opacity is the only control that changes how it looks.

The preview

Beneath the sliders sits a live preview of the result — a coloured bar for a Linear group, a filled square for an Area group, a dot at the chosen size for a Count group.

Detection groups show the group's symbol template with the marker box drawn around it at the current width and opacity, which is the quickest way to judge whether a border is too heavy for a small symbol. If the group holds more than one template — after a merge, or after a second Detect New Symbol — a slider appears above the preview with a 1 / 3 style counter so you can page through them.

Moving the group to a Service

The last item in the popover is Move to Service, a list of the Marker Services on this drawing plus New service... and Remove from service. It is here rather than in the group menu, so if you have gone looking for it under this is where it went. See Marker Services.

The default border width

New groups start at the border width set in your preferences. Open User Preferences from the user menu, go to Appearance, and set Detection Border Width under Sizing. It accepts 1 to 50 and shows a live preview bar; the default is 4.

This is a per-browser setting and it only affects groups created afterwards. Existing groups keep whatever width they already have.

Next steps

• Group visibility — Cover and Hide, for when a colour change is not enough.
• Managing groups — the rest of the group row and its menu.
• Marker Services — grouping several groups under one service heading.
• Exporting drawing images — where these colours end up.