Drawing the event to scale

Drawing it to scale

The site planner turns a booking’s design into a drawing. Open Site plans from the booking or its design page and the plan fills the screen: the map or floor plan runs edge to edge, with everything else floating over it. The logo at the top left of the card takes you back to your plans. A booking can have several spaces (a ceremony lawn and a reception hall, say); the space menu in the card header switches between them and opens the spaces list. Before a plan opens, the planner asks where the event is: the event name is the booking’s, and Event location starts from its site address. Search for the place and pick a result, so the plan knows the exact point on the map; a venue you have used before is offered first, and reusing it keeps the walls drawn there. A new place asks whether this space is outdoors on the map or an indoor floor plan. A booking with both, a lawn and a hall, has two spaces and switches between them from the space menu. If the search is unavailable, set the point on the map yourself. A venue is the building or ground itself: upload its floor plan and tell the planner how wide it really is, or place it on a map for an outdoor job. Walls, doors and pillars are drawn once on the venue and show, locked, under every plan there.

The Site planner page lists every upcoming booking. The view buttons at the top switch between a list, a grid of cards, a board grouped by whether a plan has been started or shared, a month calendar and a sortable table, and the page remembers your choice. A booking with no plan yet opens the location form; one with plans opens its workspace.

The plan only positions things. How many chairs there are is still decided by the design, so changing a quantity there redraws the plan, and the plan can never disagree with the booking. Items you have booked but not yet placed wait in the tray.

On a computer the objects card floats over the left of the plan: Add objects for what you can draw and Placed objects for what is already on the plan, with the seats and space-per-guest sentence at its foot. The arrow on its edge hides it to give the plan the whole screen, and the plan remembers that on this computer. Selecting something opens its settings in a card below Export and Share; press Esc or the cross to put it away. Pressing Delete removes what is selected, and each press of Esc steps back once: an unfinished shape, then the tool, then the selection. The tool pill at the top lays out every tool as a button, each with its key in the corner and its name when you hover: the Hand (H), which is on when the plan opens, so a drag moves the view; Selection (V) to pick, move, resize and turn things; then the zones, the line, the text label and the measure, followed by snap, undo and redo. Clicking an object or picking it from a list switches to Selection for you. A selected marker or object shows a round turn handle above it. Scroll the mouse wheel to zoom, and hold the wheel down and drag to move around, indoors or on the map. An indoor plan opens with its drawing fitted into the space beside the sidebar. On a phone the cards live behind the Add and Objects buttons at the bottom.

The navigation rail is out of the way while you plan. The button beside the logo, Show navigation, slides it over the plan to go elsewhere, and it closes again when you pick a page.

Draw a zone and it becomes an area of the design. Under Areas, a camping, crowd, generic or parking area is drawn corner by corner and arrives named and coloured. Objects come in two sorts. Markers are coloured circles with a white icon and a white ring that stand for a point, such as an entrance or a first-aid post; a new one starts 1 m across indoors and 4 m outdoors, and you resize it by its handles. Real-size items, such as a generator, a tent or a van, draw as a top-down picture at their true footprint and show Details when selected: W across and L along their length. A marker never prints a name under it, catalogue or typed; the lists and the printed sheet’s legend name everything. Everything lives under Add objects in groups that open like an accordion (areas, routes and access, infrastructure, workforce and a library of décor). Areas, routes and access opens into areas, entry and access, and routes; infrastructure opens into smaller groups, such as electrical or toilets. One search at the top finds booked items and objects together, and Booked items or Objects beside it narrows it to either. The search and the tabs stay in place while the list under them scrolls. Routes and barriers also offer ready-styled lines (pedestrian and vehicle routes, a fence, a crowd barrier and trackway) that you can restyle like any other line. Workforce posts draw as coloured dots named by their role, and the printed sheet’s legend counts them. Pick an object and it follows the pointer until you click the plan to put it down, or drag the row straight onto the plan; Esc cancels. Pick the same row a second time (or press Enter twice) and it lands in the middle of the view, so a plan can be drawn without a mouse. Drop a table inside a tent inside a lawn and it files under the tent. Delete a drawing and the placement stays on the design; its booked item counts it as still to place, and picking the item draws it back. Booked items are grouped by their inventory category, and a category with something still to place starts open. Each item shows its own picture and a count such as 16/40: sixteen of the forty booked still to place. A zone and its area share one name, so renaming either renames both, and dropping an item outside every zone lets you name a new area on the spot.

Routes, fences, barriers and the plain line tool all draw point by point, in their own colour as you go. Tap the plan for each point; Enter, a double-click or Finish line ends the line, a right-click or Undo point takes the last point back, and Esc abandons it. With three or more points, tap the first point again to close the line into a shape in the same colour and line style, with a faint fill. One undo removes a finished line whole.

Maps load from the open street map by default. If one cannot load, the plan shows on a plain grid and says so.

Colour and line style

Select a shape, line or zone and its settings open with its name, which you can type over to rename it (a booked item keeps the booking’s name, and renaming a zone renames its area), then where it is (indoors in metres or feet, latitude and longitude outdoors, with a button to copy it) and Styling: one colour chip that opens the palette, beside its opacity as a percentage, then Line style: two dropdowns, solid, dashed or dotted, and the width. A shape’s outline takes its fill colour; a line picks its own colour. Lines can carry an arrowhead at either end or both. Object setup, closed until you open it, holds the rotation, and hiding and locking. Pick several things and a setting they do not share reads Mixed until you choose one. Colours are names, so they stay readable in light and dark. Markers pick from their own fourteen colours, which look the same in either theme, and take an opacity too; their symbol switches to dark ink on a light colour so it stays readable. Until you style an object it looks as it always did. The ⋮ button beside Share switches Measurements between metres and feet. It is your own setting, kept in this browser: sizes, lengths, areas, the scale bar and the printed sheet all follow it, while the plan itself is stored the same either way.

Base map and view angle

On an outdoor plan, the Map type button in the dock picks the ground under the plan: Satellite, Satellite + labels, Satellite streets, Satellite 2, Satellite 2 + labels, Streets, Streets, light, Streets (Esri), Navigation, Topographic, Outdoor, Light grey, Dark grey, Streets with relief, Terrain, Community, Human geography, Human geography, dark, Streets at night, Navigation at night, Charted territory, Coloured pencil, Modern antique, Mid-century, Newspaper, Nova, Plain grid. The photo maps and the Esri maps appear only if your RentWeave is set up with those providers; a plan saved on a map this installation cannot draw shows streets instead and says so. The choice is saved with the plan. It is a view rather than an edit, so undo and redo pass it by. Zoom, the compass, the map type and Help are the dock at the bottom right of the plan; the map type opens a panel with a small picture of each map at this venue.

Rotate the view to line the drawing up with how people will stand in the space. If you can edit the plan, right-click and drag on it to turn the view; each drag is one step you can undo. Clicking the compass in the dock resets it to north (0°), and with the compass focused the left and right arrow keys turn it 15° at a time. Indoor and outdoor plans turn the same way. On a phone Export and Share are in the bar at the bottom. The sheet, the share page and the PNG show the plan at its saved angle. Only people who can edit plans change the map type or the angle; everyone else sees the saved view.

Undo and redo

Every change to a plan saves straight away and can be undone (all but the map type, which is a view): use the arrows in the tool pill, or Ctrl+Z to undo and Ctrl+Shift+Z to redo (Cmd on a Mac). The last fifty steps are kept until you leave the page. A change that cannot be saved, with no signal say, is put back and the plan says so.

If somebody else changed the same thing since, the undo is skipped and the plan says so, rather than putting back something that is no longer true. Deleting an area that is also drawn on another plan of the same booking cannot be undone from this plan.

Working on several things at once

Shift-click to add to the selection, or drag a box around empty canvas to pick everything wholly inside it. On a phone, open the list and turn on Select to tick rows instead. Drag one and the rest move with it; the arrow keys nudge them all by 10 cm, or a metre with Shift.

With two or more picked, Line up aligns their edges or centres, and with three or more it can space them evenly.

Copy, duplicate and Repeat

Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V copy and paste, and Ctrl+D or Duplicate copies in one go. A copy of a booked item adds to the design: past what you booked, the design page shows it as over-placed rather than refusing it. A copy of a zone is a plain shape, because each area has one footprint.

Repeat lays out copies in a row. On a booked block it shares the quantity instead: forty chairs repeated four times are four blocks of ten, and nothing extra is placed. Split breaks a block into single items. Both stop at 250 at a time.

Freeform zones

Choose Freeform zone and click each corner; the length of every side shows as you draw. Right-click removes the last corner, and double-click, Enter or a tap on the first corner finishes. On a phone, use the Undo corner and Finish zone buttons. Once it is an area, it counts towards capacity like any other zone.

Lengths, seats and space per guest

A line you draw prints its whole length along its middle while it is selected, and its settings always show it, as they do a wall’s. A measurement always prints its distance. Walls do not print theirs on the plan: they sit under every plan at the venue, and a figure on each would bury the drawing.

Selecting a zone shows its floor area, the seats at the tables inside it and how many seats that makes per square metre. Only items with seats count, so a zone of standing guests or loose chairs shows its area alone rather than a density of zero. When the booking has a guest count, the bar along the top also shows the floor area per guest across the plan’s zones. These are figures to check against your venue’s rules, not a safety certificate: nothing is refused for being crowded.

Snapping

While you drag, objects snap to a half-metre grid and to the edges and centres of whatever is nearby, and a dashed guide shows what they snapped to. Hold Alt to place freely, or turn snapping off with the magnet in the tool pill.

Folders, hiding and locking

Placed objects lists everything drawn, by icon and name, with the count at the top. Its search icon filters the list as you type, the folder icon adds a folder and Select picks several at once. Group objects into folders. Hide a folder to take everything in it off the drawing, or lock it so nothing in it can be moved or deleted by accident. Single objects can be hidden and locked too, from the eye and lock beside a row (they show when you point at it, and always once on) or from Object setup in their settings. Hidden and locked things stay in the list, so you can always find them to show or unlock again. Tap a folder’s name to rename it; its More menu moves it up or down or deletes it, and deleting a folder leaves what was in it on the plan.

The Venue folder holds the walls and fixed features. You can hide them on a plan; they are changed only on the venue’s own page.

Print, PDF and sharing

Export at the top right of a plan offers Print or save as PDF and Download PNG; printing opens the plan as a sheet: your logo and company, the booking, the venue, the plan’s name and the day it was printed across the top; the drawing fitted to the paper; a scale bar; and a legend of the booked items and workforce posts drawn on this plan with their quantities and counts, then the zones with their areas and, where tables sit inside them, seats per square metre. Outdoor plans print over the map at the plan’s saved angle, with a north arrow; if the map cannot load, the plan keeps that angle and arrow on a plain grid. Pick A4 or A3, portrait or landscape, then Print / Save as PDF and choose “Save as PDF” in your browser’s print window for a file. Anything hidden on the plan, on its own or by its folder, is left off the sheet, the legend and the image alike.

Download PNG opens the same sheet and saves it as an image. If an indoor plan’s floor-plan image cannot be copied into a picture, the button stays off and says so; printing to PDF still includes it. If the floor-plan image cannot load at all, the sheet is drawn without it and tells you, and so does a PNG that could not be made.

Share makes a link anyone can open without an account, to view the plan and never change it. The link is live: whoever has it sees your changes the next time they open it. Add a password if the link may travel further than you meant; a viewer who enters it stays in for 12 hours. New link stops the old one working at once, and changing the password asks everybody for the new one. Stop sharing turns the link off; sharing again makes a fresh one. A shared plan says so on the booking’s list of plans.

The reference board

Every booking has a reference board: the mood board for the job, kept apart from the site plan. Open it from the booking’s Design section, or use the Plan | Board switch in the planner. Add photos (drop or paste them, or use Add and then Image), notes, links, colours, and items from your catalogue. Group cards into sections such as Palette or Florals, and link a section to an area of the design if it belongs to one.

Canvas is a free board you pan and zoom; List shows the same cards one under another, and suits a phone. Anything you can drag you can also do from a card’s Options menu or its up and down buttons, so the keyboard and a screen reader reach it all. Undo and redo cover every change, and deleting a card offers Undo right away. Choose Edit on a photo to describe it, which is also what screen readers read out. An item card can be added to the booking with Add to booking, which checks availability the way the booking page does; the board itself never changes the booking. On an empty board, Copy from another booking starts from a board you made before.

Share makes a view-only link, optionally behind a password, in the same way as a site plan. On a computer the shared page opens on the canvas, laid out as you arranged it, which your customer can pan and zoom but not change; List switches to the cards one under another, and a phone always gets the list. A card marked Internal (from its menu) is never sent to the shared page at all, so use it for supplier quotes and anything the customer should not see.