How to Automate Graphic Reports of Any Object in Your Design

The Graphic Legend tool, one of the most exciting updates with Vectorworks 2023, creates annotated graphic legends of objects in your file's design layers. It's a great way to tabulate items in your drawings with clear project annotations, and it's a massive time-saver.

This post will introduce you to the Graphic Legend tool and how you can best use it on your next project. 

An Introduction to the Graphic Legend Tool

The Graphic Legend tool removes the tedious and manual process of creating graphic legends. 

It automatically coordinates with the resources you've used in your file and gives you an easy editing and customization process. With the feature, you can ensure the accuracy of legends and drawing keys for documentation.

The Graphic Legend tool creates smart tables on sheet layers for documenting objects like light fixtures, furniture, plants, and more. 

Additionally, the tool can show object attributes, acting as a drawing legend to label finishes or a list of images, textures, or colors.

Using Graphic Legends for Attributes

You can display attributes such as fill, texture, material, and pen type with the Graphic Legends tool.

When displaying either object attributes or objects themselves, you can filter by viewport. For object attribute legends, if that viewport has data visualization applied, the object attributes will show that data visualization.

Also with object attribute legends, you can report data related to the object, helping you provide information like counts, names, descriptions, and parameters automatically in your documentation. 

Using Graphic Legends for Objects

In addition to having control over what objects you're creating legends for, you can control the rendering and view of them as well.

Your objects can be shown in an isometric, orthogonal, or top/plan view, and they can be rendered in any rendering style available to you when creating viewports. With this capability, not only can you report what you want, but it can also look as you want it to. 

If not all the parts of an object are relevant (given the purpose of the legend), you can show or hide specific parts via its class visibility. 

If the object is a symbol, you can report data attached in the form of a record or general data like the number of items and location. If the object is a plug-in object, in addition to reporting data from an attached record format, you can report object parameters.

What's Coming to Future Versions of Vectorworks?

Curious about what features are coming to future versions of Vectorworks? Well, you're going to want to check out the Vectorworks Development Roadmap.

The Graphic Legend tool, in fact, started in the Roadmap. The page is a way for the Vectorworks community to follow along with our engineering team, plus have the ability to offer feedback and, recently, submit feature requests.

Click the button below to view the Roadmap and see what's coming soon: