What View actually does

Shelves

The Studio shows the office's jobs on shelves: Active Jobs, Bids by year, Lost Bids by year and Past Jobs by year, with a cancelled job in its year's Cancelled. Each shelf folds away and says how many are on it. Active jobs and bids start open.

Jobs nobody placed are under Other projects, and an office where nothing has a shelf sees the list it always did.

Moved for you

The program that keeps your jobs, like an estimating or ERP system, says where each one sits and moves it as a bid is won or lost and a job finishes. Nobody drags a job from shelf to shelf, and nothing on it changes when it moves.

It's two calls on the Office server's API. For developers.

Drawings in their folders

Inside a job, its drawings sit in the folders they came from in the job's own files, such as 01 Drawings or 10 Shop Drawings / For Fabrication. Nothing else from the share comes with them.

A drawing issued again replaces only the one of the same name in the same folder, with its takeoff carried across to check. S-101 for approval and S-101 for fabrication are kept as two drawings.

In a box, with what's in it

When a new version is ready, a box in the middle of the window says which one and what's new in it, laid out the way it was written, with Restart now and Later.

Never in the middle of your work

Nothing restarts on its own. The box waits for a mouse button to be let go, so a markup you're dragging is finished first. Later leaves the new version to take over the next time the program opens.

Out of the way while it downloads

A small card in the corner says a new version is on its way. Help → Check for Updates answers in a small box too, and brings back a box you put off.

Click and type

Pick Text Box and click where the words go, then type. The words go on the sheet as you type them, in their own size, colour and weight, and the box grows with them. Enter starts a new line.

Drag out a box instead and the words wrap inside it. The box gets taller as they run past the bottom.

The toolbar's font, size, colour, bold, italic and alignment change the words while you're still typing them.

Finished when you click away

Click anywhere else on the sheet, or press Esc, when you're done. You're back to picking things up, so the box can be moved or sized straight away.

A box left with nothing in it goes away. Double-click the words to change them.

Callouts, Cloud+ and Typewriter

A callout is two clicks: the thing it's about, then where the words go, and then you type. Its box grows away from what it points at, and the leader stays on the middle of its side. The words of a Cloud+ grow the same way.

Typewriter words have nothing drawn round them, on the screen or on paper.

Move sheets in Thumbnails

Drag a sheet up or down the Thumbnails list and let go where it belongs. A bar shows where it will land. Picked sheets move together, and the list scrolls when you drag near the top or bottom.

Drag a PDF from File Explorer or the Finder onto the list and its sheets go into the drawing where you let go. Right-click a sheet to insert pages from a file or a blank sheet, move it to the top or bottom, rotate it or delete it.

Markups move with their sheets, bookmarks and layers are left alone, and Undo puts it all back one step at a time.

Edit the drawing's words

Edit → Edit Text outlines every paragraph on the sheet. Click one and retype it where it is. The strip above it sets the size, colour, bold, italic and alignment, and Done or Ctrl+Enter writes it into the drawing.

The lines of a note are one paragraph and wrap to the width the note already had. The words keep the drawing's own font when it has every letter they need; when it doesn't, the paragraph goes to the nearest standard font and the status line says which one and why.

Before the change is kept, the rest of the sheet is drawn again and has to come out exactly as it was. If it doesn't, nothing is written. Undo puts the words back. Lettering a CAD program drew as lines isn't text and can't be retyped.

Markups after they're placed

Pick a markup and it shows handles. Drag a corner or a side to resize it, drag a point to move just that point, and drag a callout's tip to aim its leader somewhere else. Pictures and signatures keep their shape unless you hold Shift.

Double-click a text box or a callout to retype it on the sheet. Boxes, circles and clouds now stay the size they were drawn.

Right-click a markup for its fill, outline, line weight and see-through, in any colour you like. Multiply blends a fill into the drawing the way a highlighter does, so the linework under it still shows. The pen chooser has the same.

Cloud+

Drag out the cloud, click where the words go, and type. A leader runs from the cloud to the words. The cloud and its words move, copy and delete as one. Drag the words box by itself and the leader follows. Double-click the cloud to change the words.

Other PDF programs see an ordinary cloud and callout, grouped together.

Your signature

Markup → Signature. The first time, draw it with the mouse or a pen, or load a photo or scan of it on paper and the paper is taken out. It's kept on your computer, so after that it's one click. Initials work the same way, and you can keep more than one.

It goes down as a stamp that blends into the drawing, so the lines under it still show.

A Classic look

View → Classic Look turns the program grey, with raised buttons, sunken boxes and a navy band across panel titles, the way desktop software used to look. Nothing moves and every tool is where it was.

It's remembered, and it's a checkbox in Preferences too. One click puts the modern look back.