Landmark Special Interest Group December 2019

In this session, we covered how the Tag tool can increase the ease and efficiency with which you work with plants and hardscapes.

Topics Covered:

• 00:10    One practice that I have is not using the plant tags. I like to set up my drawings according to true north, which skewers my tags. Part of the problem with the plant tags is where to put them—do you put them on your design layer or in the annotation window of your viewport? With our tags on the design layer, we created a viewport and used the scaling feature to adjust the text. However, we weren’t happy with the results—when I scaled the text, some tags didn’t line up with their leaders anymore; some tags were outside of the viewport crop; some tags were in the viewport, but I didn’t want them to show; some text was bigger, while other text was smaller; etc. That is why I like to turn off my plant tags (and hardscape tags) and use the Tag tool. The tool picks up the tag information from the object and you can adjust them right in the viewport. They update automatically—so if you adjust your plant information on the design layer, the tags in the viewport will update.
• 11:45    People say to me: “Jonathan, you told us to put stuff on the design layer instead of in the annotation window of the viewport so that everything connects to the model.” I know I said that—but that was before we had the Tag tool! The Tag tool connects to the model, so I’m not losing anything. This technique is especially useful for doing jobs where you have a site plan but also plenty of details—the Tag tool adjusts for the scale of your drawing so that the text always prints the same.
• 14:48    With the Tag tool, you can also customize the tag layout—for example, defining the tag fields by adding the Common Name or quickly changing the text to italics. The Tag tool works so well because there are tags specific to each kind of object. If you’ve customized a tag for some kind of landscape object, you might not be able to use it on a similar kind of object—you might need to customize a tag for that object, too. We went through the steps for how to do that. This tool is so useful to me that I’ve added it to my Basic tool set!

Landmark December 2019

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