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Drawing & measuring

Annotate the map, edit feature geometry and take measurements with the Draw and Measure tools.

DropMaps has two toolbars for working directly on the map: Draw for creating and editing geometry, and Select for picking features to act on. Both appear as their own tab in the side panel.

Screenshot placeholder — the Draw toolbar in Freehand mode.

Draw

Open the Draw tab. The toolbar’s top row switches between three modes:

  • Freehand — quickly sketch points, lines, polygons and text annotations into a drawing layer. Pick (or create) a drawing layer, then choose a tool: Point, Line, Polygon, Rect or Text. For text, type your Label text before placing it.
  • Update (Edit) — create, update and delete geometry in an existing data layer. Choose a Target layer, then draw new features or use Select existing to click a feature and reshape it. With one feature selected, Attributes opens its property editor.
  • Measure — see below.

While drawing, Undo removes the last point and Cancel abandons the current shape. Use the Pan button to return to normal map navigation.

Draw settings & snapping

Draw settings (the gear on the Draw bar) sets the symbol style for each tool — fill, outline, size, and for text the font size, bold and halo. It also holds Snapping: turn it on, choose Vertex and/or Edge snapping, set a Tolerance in pixels, and tick which layers to snap to — so new geometry locks cleanly onto existing features. You can also style the selection highlight here.

When you draw into a layer that doesn’t exist yet, pick + New drawing layer… (freehand) or + New data layer… (edit) from the layer dropdown.

Measure

In the Draw tab, switch to Measure mode and pick a type:

  • Distance — click along a path to measure length.
  • Area — click a polygon to measure area.
  • Coord — drop a point to read its coordinates.
  • Existing — click any existing feature to stamp its measurement as a label.

Each measurement is labelled on the map. Clear removes them.

Selecting features

Choosing features to act on lives in the separate Select toolbar — picking a set, then deleting, moving, copying or tabling it. See Selecting features for the full walkthrough.

Next steps