Feature preview: New Labels and Markers for 2D objects

New features coming soon

Today I’m happy to show you the first preview of the new labels we’ll be introducing to objects for 2D/PDF.

The feedback we’ve received from users is that they wanted a better way to customise placement, size and printing handling for labels. We changed how labels worked in the latest version of Geometra but didn’t quite hit the mark. While we made them highly customisable, they didn’t work out in real-life scenarios as well as we thought they would, and users have let us know they’re using them far more than we expected.

These were designed so that a user should enable maybe one or two sets on an entire page because we believe they are mostly cluttering up your view and all the values are available in the properties pane on the right-hand side.

So, we’re reworking them from the ground up to make them be more like how they’ve worked in the previous version, but we’ve added several ways to customise and tweak them.

Labels and Markers

First, when you select a single object, you’ll now see a new type of marker pop up along the lines and edges of your shapes. These will be numbered 1-x and will make it easier to visually pick out the lengths or walls you need so you can quickly add an estimation row for that part.

Second, they’re no longer individually selectable, so you don’t have to worry about clicking and moving one by mistake. All labels are connected to their respective objects and will follow them when moved.

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The size of the property panel has also been reduced significantly compared to the previous setup. You’ll now only have two buttons from which you can select which values you wish to display for the object. Once activated, the rest of the customisations will appear and become available to configure.

For Center labels, you can now adjust them by X and Y proportionally to the size of your object, meaning you can adjust the placement, but you still have to stay inside the outer dimensions of your object. This should allow for some customisation of order while keeping the labels related to your object. More new options also add fonts, font size, colour, background and opacity alongside placement.

We’ve added two types of markers; one is the marker that shows the variable number along the line or edge, and the other is the angle marker, which will display an arc in each corner and the degrees of that corner when selected. Markers are intended to interpret and find details for objects, while labels are a more permanent descriptive feature.

If you have any questions or ideas about the new Labels and Markers we’re implementing, please make heavy use of the Feedback tool in Geometra!