Concept: Notes management
All Vectorworks products contain the Callout tool for annotating items in the drawing. The Vectorworks Design Suite provides an additional full set of features for creating and managing complete and fully-referenced annotation of project files. These features can streamline the annotation process by providing a central location for saving, selecting, and placing frequently-repeated notes. Notes can be reused across files, either within a project, or across separate projects. Notes can be placed as callouts, keynotes, or general notes.
A callout is text with one or more leader lines, that displays information about an item in the drawing. A callout object is included with the Vectorworks Fundamentals product.
Available with Vectorworks Design Suite products, a keynote is a callout represented by a number or a letter, with a corresponding keynote legend containing the full text. The keynote legend automatically numbers the notes and ensures that multiple instances of the same note are assigned the same keynote number. Keynotes are commonly used in commercial construction, where drawings, and especially details, have many notes. For residential projects, keynotes might only be used for the detail pages; other pages might use full callouts.
General notes, also available in the Vectorworks Design Suite products, contain numbered notes that are not associated with a particular item in the drawing.
The callout, keynote legend, and general notes objects can be used with manually-entered text, or in conjunction with external database files that save and retrieve text. When a database is used, text is entered only once into the database, and then pulled from the database for the notes in the drawing. This eliminates the need to type the same note repeatedly and also ensures consistency. The database can be copied or imported into the next project, so that most of a new project's notes are already typed and ready to go.
After notes have been placed, if changes are made to the database or to the notes, the differences can be reconciled with the Reconcile Notes command.
