More control of "Detail callout" markers by style, to allow consistency of appearance

[line-weight]

 

Detail callout markers (DCMs) have three basic parts

- The bit I've made red above, which I'll call the "crop box". The line colour, type, thickness and fill of this are controlled per instance, by changing the object's attributes in the attributes panel. If the DCM is given a certain class, then the attributes of this "crop box" can be set to be by class. The shape of this crop box is essentially drawn per instance.

- The bit I've made green which VW calls the "leader (and shoulder?)". The attributes of this line can be controlled per instance using the DCM's OIP, or they can be controlled by a DCM style.

- The bit I've made black I'll call the "marker" and the layout and appearance of this can be controlled by style

 

What I'd like:

1) The attributes, and basic shape of the "crop box" should be included in the things that can be controlled by style. Why would I want to control the leader & shoulder by style, but not the crop box? It doesn't make sense. At the moment, to get a reasonably consistent appearance for all of these objects I have to do it using a special class.

2) If "rounded rectangle" is to be one of the shapes we can use for the crop box, then the radius of the corner fillets needs to be independent of the scale of the viewport I'm using it on. That is, whatever value I give for the fillet radius needs to produce the same result whether I'm using it on a 1:100 or 1:2 scale sheet layer viewport. I see no reason why it is useful to have it relative to the scale of the viewport.

3) If "rounded rectangle" is to be one of the shapes we can use, and especially if it's not included in the things we can control by style, then there needs to be an easy way of retrospectively changing the radius of those corner fillets. At the moment it's unintuitive and convoluted, and involves changing each vertex individually using the "change vertex mode" of the reshape tool.

[Andy Broomell]

Very good analysis.

[line-weight]

Much of this applies to regular callouts too, although, of course, currently everything is slightly different to enable maximum user confusion.

 

They can't be controlled by style at all, so firstly, give us callout styles please, but

 

1) Have all properties controllable by style

2) The various things controlled by numerical values, again, need to be independent of the scale of the viewport I'm using the callout on. That is, whatever value I give for things like the "shoulder length" needs to produce the same result whether I'm using it on a 1:100 or 1:2 scale sheet layer viewport. I see no reason why it is useful to have it relative to the scale of the viewport. I'm sure I'm not alone in regularly copy-pasting a callout from a 1:100 viewport to a 1:10 viewport to find myself with an enormous leader line that stretches outside of the drawing sheet.

3) About the rounded rectangles probably applies too, I'm not sure as I don't use them in my callouts.

 

Edited April 21, 2023 by line-weight

[Tom W.]

I'd be quite happy seeing Callout functionality moved over to Data Tags i.e. be able to interactively resize text in Data Tags + access the Notes Database. I rarely use Callouts any more but these two things are missing from Data Tags.