Choose what each room on a floorplan shows

Several settings landed for controlling how a plan reads, which matters most on a site plan where half a dozen coloured rectangles have to tell a reader what they are.

Symbols across a space

A room can be tiled with a symbol saying what the space is: trees across green space, cars across parking, water across a pool. The Fill pattern setting on any selected room offers Trees, Cars, Water, Paving, Play equipment, Dots and Hatching, plus None.

It starts on Automatic, which means whatever that kind of space normally uses, so green space, parking, a pool, a playground and a walkway come with a symbol and everything else starts plain. Automatic is not the same as None: a room left on it picks up the right symbol if its type is changed later, and plans drawn before patterns existed pick theirs up without being touched.

The last option is Custom icon, which opens the same icon picker the website builder uses and tiles the room with whatever you choose. Pick a dog for a dog run, a bicycle for bike storage, a wheelchair for accessible parking. Renters see the same icon on the published page. A point of interest can take an icon the same way, so the marker says what to look at rather than only that there is something to look at.

Turning the numbers off

By default every room prints two lines under its name, its size and its area. Sizes and Areas in the toolbar switch them for the whole plan, and they are saved with the drawing because they change what a renter sees rather than being a preference about looking at it.

A single room can disagree. The Size line and Area line dropdowns give each block three choices: follow the plan, always show, or always hide. That covers the case where a site plan wants no dimensions anywhere except on the property boundary.

Where the label sits

Every room label can be moved to any edge or corner, turned a quarter turn either way, resized and recoloured. Turning a label is what makes a narrow room readable, since the text can run along the room instead of across it. The name, the dimensions and the area move, turn and scale as one block, so the three lines never come apart from each other.

On an L shaped or U shaped room the positions are worked out against the largest open rectangle that fits inside the room rather than the box drawn around it, because the middle of the box around a U is in the gap between its arms, which is usually another room.