Drawing: tools, the command line and snaps

How to draw, how to be quick about it, and how to make things land exactly where you mean.

6 min read

Making a drawing

A project starts with no drawing, and it can hold as many as the job needs, a plan of survey, a locate sketch base, a design check, each on its own name.

Open the Backsight menu (the wordmark, top left) and choose New drawing. The same link is in the Explorer under Drawings, and on Project overview → Drawings.
Give it a name. Two drawings in one project cannot share a name.
Keep the project's coordinate system, which is offered first. Change it only when this drawing is genuinely on a different grid.
Create. The drawing opens on the Draw tab.

Note

Surfaces, orthophotos, plot sheets, alignments and stakeout lists belong to one drawing, not to the project. A second drawing starts empty: attach imagery and build surfaces in it separately. The Draw tab opens the newest drawing unless a link named one; the Drawing switch above the canvas and the Explorer move between them.

Drawing something

Choose a tool from the Draw ribbon, or type its alias and press Enter.
Click to place each vertex.
Double-click, or press Enter, to finish.
Esc cancels whatever is in progress without leaving half a line behind.
Backspace removes the last vertex while you are still drawing.

Placing points

Point places a shot where you click and numbers it for you, which is what you want for a run of them. Point details is the same click when the shot has a number, a height and a code of its own: pick the spot, then fill in the point number, elevation and description before it is placed.

Leave the elevation blank

Point details reads the height from the surface under your pick. Outside the surface it places the point with no elevation and says so, nothing is extrapolated past a surface's edge.

Several surfaces: say which

When a drawing has more than one surface, the first tool that reads a height, Point, Point details, Points on surface, Slope label, asks which surface to read from, once. The status bar names the surface behind every Z it shows, and its Z from list changes the choice at any time.

Both snap. A click on existing geometry takes its exact coordinates, and a description that matches a description key draws the point with that symbol.

Points join the survey when you save

A point placed on the canvas becomes a real survey point in the project's “Drawn points” file, at the moment you save the drawing, and it takes its point number then. Undo it, delete it or close without saving and nothing is written, so the point file holds exactly the points the drawing kept.

The command line

Type a letter anywhere on the canvas and the command line takes focus. It takes the aliases your fingers already know, and it answers in words, what it did, or why it would not.

The ones worth learning first

Type	Command
L	Line
PL	Polyline
C	Circle by dragging
CR	Circle by typed radius or diameter
LB	Line by length and bearing
PD	Point details, picked, with number, elevation and description
O	Offset
CO	Copy
M	Move
TR / EX	Trim / Extend
DI	Distance between two points
AA	Area of picked corners
LI	List what is selected
Z	Zoom
U	Undo

Enter repeats

Pressing Enter on an empty command line runs your last command again. Offsetting twenty lines is one keystroke each after the first.

Making things land exactly

OSNAP, snap to endpoints, midpoints, centres, intersections, perpendiculars and existing points. Right-click the OSNAP chip to choose the modes; Apparent intersection (where two lines would meet if extended) is there too, off unless you want it.
SNAP, snap to the grid. The crosshair jumps to the grid point and the readout says “grid”, so what a click will place is never a guess.
ORTHO, constrain to right angles.
GRID, show the grid; it steps up as you zoom out so it never becomes a grey wash.

The toggles are on the status bar along the bottom. They are per-drawing and they stay as you left them.

Changing what you have drawn

Click to select, then edit in the properties card that opens beside it on the canvas.
Right-click any entity for the actions that apply to it.
Drag a selected entity to move it; grips on the vertices reshape it.
Match properties (MA) copies layer, colour, text height and point style onto another selection.
Ctrl+Z undoes, and every command says how to reverse what it just did.