Sketch

Sketch Layer Introduction

Short introduction video.

OCAD Sketch Layer and it's tools are designed to be used for field work with a tablet and a pen. The main approach is to make field work drawing as ergonomic as possible. There are just two simple tools: Drawing pen and Eraser. Different colors and pen widths can be chosen for drawing.
The Sketch Layer is an own layer within the OCD file and its features are stored as polylines with a line width and a color. The sketch features are not assigned to any map symbols. The Sketch Layer is rendered on top of the map.

Windows Pen Settings

We recommend to turn on the Ignore touch input setting: Windows settings → Pen & Windows Ink → Ignore touch input when I’m using my pen. This ignores touch inputs as long as the pen is near the tablet screen.
Touch inputs are also ignored as long as you wear gloves!

Sketch Toolbar

Choose the Sketch Mode button in the Edit and Drawing Toolbar to show the Sketch toolbar.
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Sketch Pen Tool

Choose the Sketch Pen tool for drawing.
Sketch drawing starts with placing the pen on the screen and ends when the pen is lifted from the screen.
Show Screen Grid with a real world distance of e.g. 10 or 20 meters can help to estimate the distances.

Sketch Eraser Tool

Choose the Sketch Eraser tool to erase sketch features or parts of them. In contrast to custom OCAD map objects no preliminary feature selection is needed for this.

Select Color

Select the drawing color by clicking on one of the colored squares.
The full height color rectangle in the left shows the current color.

Select Pen Width

Select the pen width by clicking on a gray pen width field.
The field with the selected pen width is shown in black color.

Show/Hide Sketch Layer

Click the Show/Hide Sketch Layer button to show or hide the Sketch Layer.

Auto Detection of Objects by Shape and Color

Turning on the Auto Detection of Objects option will detect the pattern of some orienteering map point features and automatically add it to the map as symbolized point object.
The option is turned off by default and only available if the map symbol set corresponds to ISOM 2017 or ISSprOM 2019.
The tool expects shapes sizes of max. 50 pixels width/height. This corresponds approx. to the size of the symbolized point objects on the screen when working with a zoom factor between 8x – 12x.

Save as Image and Load as Background Map

Click the Save as Image and Load as Background Map button to make a PNG file copy of the current sketch features and to load this PNG file as a background map.
This may be used as a backup function while field work or if you prefer to have the sketch features in the background for drawing the map at home after field work.
The function requires that the ocd file is saved – it does not work for new untitled files.

Sketch Menu

There is a new Sketch menu which contains just a few menu items at the moment.

Hide

This function can be used do show/hide the Sketch Layer. It's the same as using the button on the Sketch toolbar (which is not available in Course Setting and Viewer edition).

Delete All Sketch Features

This functon can be used to clean up a file from all sketch features. Note: There is no UNDO for this function! A message about this needs to be confirmed: