Spot Annotations 2

Following on from yesterday’s post on step annotations, I wonder whether there’s scope to expand the range of similar annotations. Currently, there are three special-purpose spot annotations: Spot Elevation, Spot Coordinate and Spot Slope. I’m always looking for ways to generalise special-purpose tools, to make them more versatile and perhaps more intuitive.

If you imagine how you would design tools like these in the family editor, you’d need to define host points and be able to annotate based on the properties (X,Y,Z) of those host points. That’s all the spot annotation tools do, and it’s what my proposed step annotation tool does.

Thinking about how you’d place these annotation in the project, it would be simplest to just place them with one click, and then drag any extra host points to position them. Alternatively, you could place multi-point annotations with a series of clicks – it just might make for an awkward user interface, each family needing a different number of clicks.