Drafting

Tools

With its wide range of drawing and editing tools, HighDesign provides you a solution to achieve your goals as a designer, in architecture, engineering, interior design, mechanical drafting, landscaping, and more!

The toolbars provide all the familiar drawing tools to create vector objects, from basic to complex shapes: lines, curves, arcs and ovals, polygons, hatches, patterns and textures, groups and symbols. Modify with geometric transformations, scale and stretch, fillet and chamfer, offset and explode, trim, and more.

Snapping

Snaps are drawing aids that ensure the precision required in a technical drawing by adjusting automatically the precision of points defined by the cursor. HighDesign includes several different snaps:

• Grid
• Object end points and vertices, mid-points, borders and fill
• Intersections between objects
• Right angles and tangents
• Horizontal, vertical and parallel alignments
• Symbol items

Quick Input & On-screen information

Enter absolute and relative coordinates, distances, offsets, lengths and angles with a single keystroke. Lock angles to defined values or parallel, perpendicular and tangent to reference items.

On-screen info appears for relevant items and situations: selections, locked layers, invalid references, and more, will help you stay in control in every aspect of your design process.

You can select metric and imperial units, and enter drawing scales in ratio (1:100) or verbal (1'' = 1'-0'') verbal formats.

Layers and Resources

HighDesign offers advanced tools to keep your project well organized: Groups, Layers and Sheets (in Standard and Pro editions), help you keep everything in its place, easy to find and easy to modify. Automatically link drawing tools to specific layers to keep everything organized with no effort. No matter the size of your project, a good organization will improve your productivity and cut the project time dramatically.

Search & Select

In HighDesign you will never lose track of any element in your project. In addition to the smart snapping function, you can use a range of commands to select and find objects with precision: select by object class, layer or style, invert selection, select overlapped.

The Find tool offers a further degree of powerful options and criteria to isolate exactly the items you want.

Radial Menu

The radial menu provides all the relevant actions right where you need them: right click to open a visual menu organized in sections to quickly access the function you want. Functions include Edit, with the Cut, Copy, and Paste commands, Undo, Arrange; View and zoom commands; Modify and Edit Tools; advanced tools; Organize to quickly access groups, layers and sheets.

Project Views

A Project View is a snapshot of the current view that stores position, zoom and the current visibility of sheets and layers.

Dimensions

Easily add orthogonal and aligned, radial and angular, ordinate and elevation dimensions.

Associate the dimension to the element (Standard/Pro), and define units, precision and appearance of the dimension and its label.

You can set the graphic attributes of the witness line, reference lines, extension and arrow gaps, arrow and marker type and size, position, offset and style of the text label, so you can match the CAD standards in use in your organization.

Texts & Annotations

Communicate more effectively with the text and annotation tools in HighDesign. You can document the project with styled text paragraphs, and extract information from elements with annotations with leader lines.

Both text blocks and annotations can have different graphic styles, frame shapes and colors.

Print & Exchange Files

HighDesign's output capabilities include high quality printing and exporting to digital image formats. The Print window provides you with many options to fine-tune the final result: you can choose which view to print, scale the drawing and fit it to one page, set a color filter, define pen weights, and more.

With the Export as Image options you can create a picture of the project with the "alpha" channel, that is, without its background. For example, with this option you can easily compose views of your project with pictures of the project site, or add photographic backgrounds.

HighDesign can import and export DXF and DWG® drawings up to version 2018/2020.