Autotag

Draw’s ‘autotag’ facility enables you to generate automatically a series of Labels in one or more VIEWS of a Drawing, having defined a set of rules to control those elements that are to be labelled and the (common) appearance of the labels.

The automatically generated labels (which can be GLABs or SLABs) can then be individually modified. For example, it may be necessary to reposition a label or to modify its leader line. The functionality is subject to a few constraints so as to prevent Labels from becoming out of line with the criteria under which the autotagging process operated.

The autotagging process is under the control of a Tag Rule (TAGR) element. The relevant part of the Draw database hierarchy is indicated in the example.

A Tag Rule exists as a member of a Layer (LAYE) or of a Tag Ruleset (TRST). Tag Rulesets are owned by Tag Rule Libraries (TRLB).

The Layer element has a Tag Ruleset Reference attribute (TRSF), which, if set, refers to a TRST. All automatically generated Labels are owned by a Layer. Those Labels within a given Layer are generated either from TAGRs owned by that Layer or from TAGRs referenced by the Layer via its TRSF attribute.

Having defined a TAGR element, the Labels are generated by giving the command:

UPDATE TAGGING

The UPDATE TAGGING command can be given whenever the Design changes such that Labels move (but remain within the VIEW), or if the TAGR itself changes.