The Inspection Tools are the utilities that every advanced design app should have

The design process involves professionals and their collaborators constantly monitoring the project during its various stages of progress: for this purpose the most advanced design apps provide designers with a complete collection of essential instruments for project review.

Surveying the project with the Measurement Tools

The inspection of a project always begins with verifying the accuracy of measurements and compliance with the required standards. For this reason Measurement tools are indispensable for ensuring that every element of a project aligns perfectly with the intended design specifications.

This toolset provides three methods that add temporary survey elements to the project: Line measurement, Path measurement and Area measurement.

Measurement tools use the Snap to Objects function to precisely fasten the tape measure to the ends of the distances to verify.

This survey elements show some labels: linear length and angle of the partial segments and the total path or perimeter and the Area of the enclosed region.

The Line measurement method also allows the calibration of the project, mostly useful for imported drawings, PDF documents or acquired blueprints: those images often are not to scale or need to be rotated by an angle.

How the Markup Tools contribute to the final quality

Markup tools allow users to add comments and annotations directly to a drawing or project. These can be graphical marks, such as clouds, arrows, or text boxes, that highlight specific areas of the design that require attention or modification.

This feature is particularly useful for providing feedback, suggesting changes, or documenting important information within the design itself in order to achieve a better quality of the final design.

A Special Workspace

The use of the Markup tools requires a drawing environment apart because those tools are not intended as standard drawing or design tools but they are thought as reviewing utilities.

In HighDesign, when activating the Markup tools the Project Window switches to Markup Mode, the Graphic Properties Bar collapses and the Markup Bar opens. Snaps are temporarily disabled to avoid undesired interferences with the project elements.

The Markup bar, arranged at the bottom of the Project Window, displays all the markup tools in a wide array of tools with their graphic properties. Markup objects are automatically set in a special class: each sheet or layout of the project can have its own markup objects.

A complete Toolset of correction objects

The HighDesign Markup toolset includes:

• Freehand lines, to add freehand sketches to the project;
• Lines, to mark parts of the project with straight segments;
• Arrows, to mark details with arrow shaped segments;
• Rectangles, to enclose details with a rectangle;
• Ovals, to highlight details with an oval shape;
• Clouds, to surround details of the project with a rectangular cloud;
• Text Notes, to add text notes and graphical marks to the project;
• Callouts, to mark details of the project adding texts and graphical symbols within an arrowed label.

Note and Text Callout allow to add to the project text annotations and graphical symbols, including emojis. Note is a simple text box or graphical mark, whereas Text Callout creates an arrowed label consisting in a text or graphical mark enclosed by a rectangular box.

Markup objects and associated Information

Adding information to the elements of a project is a distinctive feature of advanced design apps such as BIM like applications and modern Revision utilities. The Markup objects in HighDesign respond to this need of documenting the different stages of the Inspection of a project.

In HighDesign every new Markup object and every change to the markups is documented. The Object Info panel of the Side bar provides fundamental information of the selected object: Class, Name, Creation date and Modification date.

Name is a text field that can be filled and changed at any time; Creation and Modification are automatically created and updated when you add new marks or modify an existing markup object.

Conclusions

Designers very often need software solutions that can provide them with both design tools and revision utilities to add marks and notes to the continuously evolving projects during the whole design process but there aren’t all-in-one applications: till now.

HighDesign now bridges the gap between the revision utilities, often available as separate expensive solutions, and the drafting and design applications by introducing a brand new complete set of Revision Utilities.