Labels and annotations

What a "label" is

A label is an attribute block inserted beside something you want to identify in plan — the start of a marking, a sign, a device, a point of interest — joined to the point of interest by a leader.

The block has no drawing: it is made only of stacked attribute definitions. Which attributes exist is what the label style decides (Styles tab), and CapCad fills in the ones it recognises:

When the point does not fall on any station of the alignment (or there is no alignment), INFO_EST and INFO_KM are written empty and the label is inserted anyway, with no rotation.

The block and the leader go to the catalogue's INFO layer role — the name, the colour and the linetype are the ones the active style resolved for that role, never a name typed in.

How the block is positioned

Which command to use

CAPCAD_LABEL_INSERT, step by step

1. If an alignment is defined, the command warns that you may enter a point or a length along the alignment — and that, if you choose the length, it will ask for the offset next.
2. Point — with no alignment, the prompt is just Ponto:.
3. Point or station — with an alignment, click a point or type a number. Typed, the number is the length along the alignment; the command then asks Valor para offset: (positive = left, Enter = 0) and re-frames the screen on the resulting point, keeping the zoom.
4. The label is inserted.
5. If the active style's block has the INFO_ITEM attribute, the command asks Marca texto:. Left blank, the value XXX stays.
6. The loop starts again. Esc ends it.

The Insert label button (40) on the Styles tab runs exactly this same loop.

The form

The five tabs are independent: Insert draws, Correct recomputes, Styles edits the label-style store, Utils works on the attributes of any block and Streets writes street names.

The strip at the bottom always shows Active: <style> — the label style active in this drawing.

The screenshots are the Portuguese renders of the form; the control positions are identical in every language.

Insert tab — Marca mode

The initial state: Marca mode, Screen reference, offset by the clicked point, scale 1:1000.

Reading the information off the entity itself

With Read entity (7) on, the (15)–(17) panel appears and button (4) starts asking for an entity at every turn of the loop:

• A curve → the legend is built by the style chosen in (9)–(12) from the layer, the length and the polyline's constant width.
• A block → the legend is the definition name, the layer and the action, per (15)–(17), separated by -.

In Alignment + Read entity mode, the label's point is the perpendicular foot of your click on the alignment, and the side comes from the click itself — nothing else to indicate. With Alignment + Select (without Read entity), the command asks for a second click, Lado..., only to know which side the label goes on.

Insert tab — Text on geometry mode

Here there is no block and no leader: CapCad writes a text over the road marking itself, rotated with its tangent, offset H × 1.25 towards the side you clicked. The text is born on the catalogue's FAIXAS_TEXT layer role, under the name the active style gives that role.

Three paths, according to (3) and (33):

Each text is tied to the geometry by an XData (capcad.geometryMark.entity) that stores the text's id on the road marking itself. That link is what lets (34) erase the old text before writing the new one.

The LFO3/LBO exception. A layer that only describes studs, with no marking code, is completed before it is read: yellow becomes LFO3, white becomes LBO. Without that, a studs-only line would come out with no code at all.

Correct tab

The tab has a single button, Correct (35) — CAPCAD_LABEL_CORRECT opens straight on it.

The command requires an alignment. With one, it hides the form, asks for a selection on screen and recomputes every label it recognises:

1. Only blocks whose name is in the label-style store (default + user + project) are taken in — the rest of the selection is ignored.
2. For each label, CapCad looks for the leader: a polyline, on a layer whose name ends in INFO, with one of its ends next to the block's insertion point.
3. With a leader — the anchor is the leader's first vertex. Latitude/longitude, northing/easting, X/Y and the side are rewritten from it, and INFO_EST gets the station of that point. INFO_KM is not touched on this path.
4. Without a leader — the block's own insertion point acts as the anchor, and only latitude/longitude, INFO_EST and INFO_KM are rewritten: neither the projected coordinates nor the side.
5. Labels whose point finds no station on the alignment are skipped and do not enter the count.

At the end, a summary says how many labels were found, how many had no leader, how many were corrected and how many were already right.

Styles tab

The list is empty outside the CAD: it is built when the command opens the form over a drawing.

The layered store

The label-style store is assembled from three layers, in this order:

A repeated name in a higher layer shadows the one below without changing its place in the list: saving a user style called INFO makes the list show INFO — user, with the attributes you defined, and the default INFO comes back on its own if you delete yours. That is why the grid stays editable even on a default style: saving is always either "save a copy" (with another name) or "shadow" (with the same name).

There are thirteen default styles, and choosing between them is choosing which attributes the label will carry:

The block definition is built on the spot: the visible attributes stacked top to bottom, height 0.15 and spacing two thirds of the height, the invisible ones parked at the origin, all with their position locked inside the block.

The two-stretch style

With INFO_DERSP as the active style, the Marca button (4) changes behaviour: instead of one point, it asks for two curves. The legend of the first goes into INFO_INICIO prefixed with INÍCIO:, the legend of the second into INFO_FIM prefixed with FIM:.

Utils tab

Three attribute tools that work on any block in the drawing, not only on labels.

Streets tab

Writes street names over the roads — the natural companion to an OpenStreetMap import, which brings the geometry of the streets without the labels.

The loop is: choose the street geometry, choose the text point, CapCad writes. Esc at either prompt ends it. The text comes out rotated with the street's tangent and flipped where needed to stay readable, and is tied to the street by an XData (capcad.geometryMark.address) — the link (59) needs.

The house number Google sometimes returns at the end of the name (, 123) is stripped.

Remembered between sessions

The whole Insert tab is remembered in your user preferences: mode, Multiple mode, Read entity and its three boxes, the Info text, the Prefixo, the legend style, the Material and Extensão boxes, Continuous, the leader length, the scale, the reference, Select, Rotate after, the offset mode and value and all seven text options — 32 controls in all, saved when the form closes.

Not remembered: the tab the form opens on (always Insert, before the command chooses its own), the Utils and Streets fields, and the style list's selection. The active style is not a user preference: it is stored inside the drawing, so each dwg has its own.

Notes

• With no alignment, the form locks itself into Screen mode. If, at the moment the form is created, no alignment is loaded, Screen is forced and Select is ticked and disabled. Defining an alignment afterwards does not release the box: you have to close and reopen the form.
• The side (INFO_LADO) always comes from the project alignment and from the block's insertion point, not from the clicked point nor from the curve chosen in Select. On a label inserted in Screen mode, far from any alignment, the attribute is left blank.
• Ação on a curve comes out with no separator. Reading a block, the parts chosen in (15)–(17) are separated by -; reading a curve, the action is concatenated without a separator at the end of the legend (LFO-2 AM 4X6IMP).
• The colour abbreviation in the Cap legend is the first two letters of the spelled-out colour name — vermelha produces VE, not the VM abbreviation used elsewhere in CapCad.
• Multiple mode + Continuous click mode really does hide the form. With both boxes ticked, the form hides at the start of the run and does not come back at the end — and running the command again does not bring it back, because the window is still open, only invisible. Keep those two apart.
• In "click once" mode, Esc at the point prompt does not cancel. The text is written anyway, at the point where you clicked the entity.
• With MText (29) ticked, Use active style (32) changes nothing. The CAPCAD_R60 style is only applied to simple text; MText always comes out with the drawing's current style.
• Text aligned for reading (31) overrides Invert (30). When reading alignment is on, it decides the angle and the inversion is ignored.
• Alignment + Select + Read entity on a block inserts nothing. A block is not a curve; the command ends silently. Combine Select with linear entities.
• Rotate after runs after the loop. The ROTATE is queued in the CAD, so with Continuous on every rotation only starts once you end the loop with Esc.
• The leader is looked for as any polyline on a layer ending in INFO. If the drawing has other polylines on a layer with that ending running beside the label, the correction may anchor on the wrong line. And the anchor is always the leader's first vertex, even when it is that end which touches the block.
• The "corrected" count counts attributes, not labels. On labels with no leader, station and km are two attributes, so a single label can add two to the count — and the summary can end up announcing more labels corrected than labels found.
• The correction summary always comes out in Portuguese, even with the interface in English.
• Load all in dwg rebuilds existing definitions. A label block you have customised by hand in the drawing is erased and rebuilt from the store.
• The form's title bar reads Labels in all three languages; only the contents are translated.
• Several captions stay Portuguese in the English interface: the Marca mode and button, Prefixo, Material, Extensão, Nome do bloco, Layer, Ação, Ext. linha chamada, Escala 1:, the Referência and Info group titles, Estilos, Nome, Altura texto and the Fonte: Google Maps note. They are quoted above as the software shows them.

See also

• Alignment Manager — the alignment the station, the tangent and the side come from.
• Draw and edit the alignment — drawing the alignment and its auxiliary alignments.
• Alignment properties — the per-station values the alignment carries.
• Station Navigator — reading a station and its coordinates at a picked point.