title: “Drawing your floor plan”

Drawing your floor plan

For gallery staff. Draw the shape of your room once, name the walls, and the places you already use for artwork get a position on a picture.

Find it under Artwork Catalog → Floor plan.

You need places first — a plan is a picture of your places. If you have not set those up, start there.

What you are drawing

Two things, and only two:

• Walls — a line with corners in it. Anything you hang work on.
• Areas — a shape with an inside. A walkway, a plinth, a case, the desk, a door.

You are not drawing the building in detail, and you are not measuring it. The plan is a sketch of the layout, not a survey: draw enough that somebody can look at it and know which wall is the east wall. Nothing on the drawing is labeled with a length, and nothing depends on a wall being exactly the size it is in the room.

Where to start

An empty plan says so, and suggests the two quickest starts:

• A room — press Rectangle and drag out the whole room in one go.
• A single wall, or a shop front — press Draw a wall and click where it starts and where it ends. A wall does not have to close into a shape.

The toolbar stays at the top of the screen while you scroll, so the tools are always next to the drawing.

Drawing a wall

1. Press Draw a wall.
2. Click where the wall starts.
3. Click where it ends. Keep clicking to add more walls that join on — a run along a shop front, say.
4. To stop, click the last point again (it lights up when the pointer is on it), press Enter, or press Finish wall. The wall stays open: nothing has to join back to where you started, so a front with a door gap is just two walls.
5. To close a run back on itself into a room instead, click the first point: it lights up once there are enough points, and one click there closes the shape.

A double-click on the last point finishes too, and never leaves an extra zero-length side behind.

Press Esc at any time to abandon a shape and start again. The hint under the toolbar always says what the current tool does and how to finish.

Any angle, with the ends on the grid

A wall can run at any angle — straight across, straight down, or slanting whichever way the room does. What snaps is the end of each wall: every point you click, every corner you drag, every corner you add and every wall you move lands on the nearest point of the grid. So two walls you meant to meet share the same point exactly, and a room closes without a hairline gap.

The grid is the one you can see on the drawing, and it is drawn a little darker while you are drawing, so you can see where a click will land. It reads like 10 x 10 graph paper: a fine line every square and a heavier line every 10 squares. Zoomed right out, the single squares would be too close together to see, so only the heavy lines every 10 squares are drawn — and the ends of walls snap to those heavy lines while you are zoomed out. Zoom in to place a corner on any square.

Nothing on the drawing shows a length or a measurement, and there is no key to switch the snapping off.

A plan drawn before walls could go at any angle looks exactly as it did. Nothing in it moves until you edit it.

Typing a wall in squares

If you drew the room on graph paper first, type it in instead of clicking. With Draw a wall picked, the toolbar has a Type a wall row: From x, From y, To x and To y, counted in squares (see The grid is numbered from 1, 1).

1. Type the start: 20 in From x, 10 in From y.
2. Type the end: 30 in To x, 10 in To y.
3. Press Enter, or press Draw wall. The wall from 20, 10 to 30, 10 is drawn.

Enter in a box moves to the next box, and Enter in the last one draws, so a whole wall is typed without the mouse. Tab moves between the boxes too.

After each wall the From boxes hold the point where it ended, so a run is typed as a list of end points: type the next To x and To y, press Enter, and the run carries on as one wall. Type a different From to start a separate wall. A typed wall can go at any angle — 30, 10 to 37, 13 slants.

Only whole numbers of squares, from 1 up, are accepted. Anything else — 12.5, a blank box, 0, or a start and end that are the same point — is refused with a short message saying why, and nothing is drawn.

Freestanding walls have two sides

• A wall against the outside of the building has one face, because the other side is the street.
• An island in the middle of the room has two faces, and each can be a different place — “Island north” and “Island south” are two different walls as far as your catalog is concerned.

Two ways to say which:

• Before drawing, tick Freestanding (two sides to hang on) next to the wall tools.
• After drawing, pick the wall (Select, then click it) and tick Hang on both sides. Untick it to go back to one side. If a place is already named on the second side, the editor refuses and tells you which place — take it off the plan first.

You can name one side and leave the other blank. A gallery that only hangs on one side of an island should do exactly that.

The grid is numbered from 1, 1

The grid is a set of coordinates, the way graph paper is when you count its squares:

• The top-left point of the grid is 1, 1.
• The first number counts across, to the right (x). The second counts down (y). So 20, 10 is 19 squares across from the top-left point and 9 squares down.
• One square is always the same square. Zooming changes how much of the grid you see, never what a coordinate means: 20, 10 is the same spot at every zoom.

To find a point by counting, the top and left edges of the drawing carry numbers: 1 at the top-left point, then every heavy line — 10, 20, 30 and so on. Zoomed a long way out there are fewer numbers (every 20, or every 50), so they do not run into each other; they are always on heavy lines.

Above the drawing, Pointer at shows the coordinate of the grid point under the pointer — the point a click would land on — as it moves.

The numbers are coordinates, not lengths. The drawing itself still shows no length anywhere; numbers only appear along its edges, in the boxes you type into, and in the corner list of what you have picked.

Plans drawn before the grid was numbered keep their shape exactly. Their points simply read in the same coordinates. A corner that was drawn left of or above the top-left point reads as 0 or a negative number; it is not moved.

Zooming and moving around

The drawing only moves when you move it. Nothing zooms or recenters by itself while you work.

Labels and corner handles stay the same size on screen at every zoom, so they are readable zoomed out and not enormous zoomed in. Zoom is only how big the picture is: it is still a sketch, and nothing gets a length when you zoom in.

On a tablet

Everything works with a finger: tap to place a point, tap a side to pick it, drag what is picked to move it. Two fingers pinch to zoom and drag together to move around. The drawing does not scroll the page under your fingers.

Drawing a rectangular room in one go

Most rooms are rectangles, and four careful clicks is a slow way to draw one.

1. Press Rectangle.
2. Press down at one corner of the room, drag to the opposite corner, and let go.

While you drag, a dashed outline follows the pointer. The corners snap to the grid you can see.

• Hold Shift while dragging to get a square.
• Press Esc before letting go to abandon it. Dragging off the edge of the drawing abandons it too.
• A drag shorter than one square of the grid in either direction draws nothing. That is a slip, not a room.

Typing a rectangle. With Rectangle picked, the toolbar has a Type a rectangle row: the Top-left x and Top-left y of the room, then its Width and Height in squares. Press Enter in the last box, or press Draw rectangle. A room at 1, 1 that is 50 wide and 110 high has its corners at 1, 1 — 51, 1 — 51, 111 — 1, 111. Width and Height must be whole numbers of at least 1.

The result is an ordinary room with four sides, closed back on itself, so each side has a face to name — exactly as if you had clicked it out.

Wall room or area. Next to the Rectangle button, Draws: is a two-way choice: Wall room (the default) or Area. The one that is lit is what the next rectangle draws. Press Area and a kind appears beside it — Walkway, Plinth, Case, Desk or Door — and the same drag, or the same typed Top-left x, Top-left y, Width and Height, draws a rectangular area of that kind. Most plinths, cases and desks are rectangles, so this is the quick way to add them. Press Wall room to go back to drawing rooms.

Fixing what you already drew

Switch to Select. Clicking a wall picks one side of it — the side under the pointer, highlighted in amber. A bar under the toolbar then shows what you can do with it:

Clicking an area picks it, and the bar offers Name this area and Delete area.

A drag only ever moves what is picked, so nothing bends by accident:

• One side picked: drag it to move that side. The corners at its ends move with it.
• The whole wall picked: drag it and every point moves together, keeping its shape.
• An area picked: drag it to move it.
• Anything that is not picked: dragging it moves the view, not the shape.

White corner handles appear on the picked wall only. Drag one to move that corner, or double-click it to remove the corner. Double-clicking a side adds a corner, the same as Add a corner.

Delete or Backspace deletes exactly what is picked — one side, a whole wall, or an area. To let go of the selection, click empty canvas or press Esc.

Changing a shape by typing

When a wall, a room or an area is picked, the bar also lists its corners in squares, one row per corner in order — x (across) and y (down). It is the list you would read off the graph paper, and every number in it can be changed:

• Type a new number and press Enter or Tab: that corner moves. A room’s first corner is also where it closes, so the room stays shut.
• Add point puts a new corner after that row. Between two corners it goes in the middle of that side, as Add a corner does; after the last point of a wall the wall carries on one square to the right, ready for you to type over.
• Remove takes that corner out, and the sides either side of it join.

A rectangle — a room of four square corners, or a rectangular area — also shows its Size in squares: Top-left x, Top-left y, Width and Height. Change them to move or resize it.

Every change you type is one step for Undo. Names stay where they are: each side keeps its identity when you move a corner or resize a room, so East wall is still the east wall (see Places stay on their side). The same whole-number rule applies, and a corner cannot be put on top of the corner next to it — that would make a side of no length. A refused change says why and leaves the shape as it was.

A wall always keeps at least two points, and a room at least three sides. If you try to remove the corner that would break that, nothing happens — that is the editor refusing, not a broken click.

Places stay on their side

Every side of every wall keeps its own identity while you edit, so a place named on a side stays on that side:

• Adding a corner splits a side in two. The place stays on the first half; the new half is unnamed. Every other side keeps its place.
• Removing a corner joins two sides into one. If one of them had a place, the joined side keeps it.
• Moving a side, a corner or a whole wall never moves a place to another side.

The labels on the drawing follow their sides as you edit, so what you see is what will be saved.

Deleting something that has places on it

If the side, wall, room or area you are deleting has places named on it, the editor stops and asks first: “2 places are on this wall and will lose their spot on the drawing”, with the places listed by name. Keep it changes nothing. Delete anyway removes it.

Until you save, a note above the drawing lists every place that will come off the drawing when you do; Ctrl+Z puts the side back and keeps them. After the save, the message names them again.

The places themselves are not deleted, and nothing hanging on them is touched. They simply have no spot on the drawing any more, and show up in the hangs nowhere tray on What hangs where until you name a new wall with them. A place is never quietly moved to a different side instead.

Undoing a mistake

Every finished change can be taken back.

Each thing you did is one step: finishing a wall, drawing a rectangle, dragging a corner from here to there, deleting a side or a plinth. Undoing a rectangle removes the whole rectangle, not one corner of it; undoing a drag puts the shape back where it started, however far you wandered on the way. Zooming and moving around are not steps — they do not change the plan.

Some things to know:

• The buttons are greyed out when there is nothing to undo or redo.
• Once you undo and then do something new, the undone steps are gone for good — Redo only goes forward along the path you are on.
• While you are clicking out a wall, Ctrl+Z takes back your last click rather than the last finished shape. Esc still abandons the whole draft.
• The shortcuts stay out of the way while you are typing a name — in a text box, Ctrl+Z and Delete do what they always do to text.
• Undo history lives only in the open editor. Saving or reloading the page starts it fresh; to go back further than that, use Versions under the drawing.

Drawing an area

1. Press Draw an area.
2. Choose what it is: Walkway, Plinth, Case, Desk or Door.
3. Click around its outline — at least three points.
4. Move back to the first point — it lights up — and click it to close the shape. Or press Finish area.

An area needs three points because it has an inside. Two points is a line, and the first point does not light up until there are enough points to close.

Typing an area’s corners

An area that is not a rectangle — an L-shaped case, a desk with a return — can be typed off the graph paper instead of clicked. With Draw an area picked and the kind chosen, the toolbar has a Type an area’s corners list: one row per corner, x (across) and y (down), in the same coordinates as walls.

1. Type the corners in order around the edge, for example 12, 4 then 18, 4 then 18, 9 then 12, 9 for a desk. Do not type the first corner again at the end.
2. Enter moves to the next box, and so does Tab. Press Enter in the last box of a filled row and a new row is added for the next corner. Add point adds a row too, and Remove takes a row out.
3. Press Draw area, or press Enter in the empty row at the end. The last corner is joined back to the first and the area is drawn, of the kind you chose, with exactly the corners you typed.

The new area is picked straight away, so you can press Name this area, or change its corners in the rows under it — see Changing a shape by typing. It is one step for Undo, and it is saved with Save plan like everything else.

Nothing is drawn if the list is wrong. Instead a plain message says which point is the problem: an area needs at least 3 corners; a corner cannot be the same as the one before it; the last corner cannot be the first one again; coordinates are whole numbers from 1 up to 100000. A row left completely empty is skipped. Your typing is kept, so you only fix the one number.

Naming what you have drawn

This is the part that connects the picture to your catalog.

1. With Select, click name this side on a wall face — or pick a side and press Name this side. For an area, click it once to pick it, then press Name this area.
2. Either pick a place you already have, or type a new name and press Create and put it here.

The new place is created and attached in one step — you never have to leave the plan, make a place somewhere else, and come back to connect them.

You do not have to save first. If the wall you are naming is new or has moved since the last save, naming a spot on it saves the drawing and then puts the place on it, and the message says so: Floor plan saved and the place put on it.

A named face shows the place’s name in green. An unnamed one keeps saying name this side, so what is left to do is visible at a glance.

To take a place off the plan, click its name and press Take it off the plan. The place and everything hanging on it stay exactly as they are; only its spot on the drawing is cleared.

Saving, and going back

Save plan stores what is on screen. The button stays greyed out until you have actually changed something. Saving keeps your zoom and position.

Leaving with unsaved changes asks first. Switching to another tab of the Artwork Catalog, or following a link to another screen, stops and asks: Stay and keep editing, or Leave without saving. Closing the browser tab asks too.

Versions

Your old plan is not overwritten. Every save is kept as a version, and Versions under the drawing lists every one of them: when it was saved, who saved it, and how many walls and areas it has. The newest is marked Current.

• Preview shows a version without changing anything.
• Restore makes that version the current plan again. It asks first, and says so plainly if you have unsaved changes on screen: they are lost. The plan you had is kept as a version too, so a restore can itself be undone by restoring. Places go back to their sides on the restored plan; a place on a wall that version does not have comes off the drawing.
• Delete removes a version for good. Only an administrator sees it. It asks first, and deleting a version never touches a place or an artwork.

The current version cannot be deleted — it is the plan everything else reads. To get rid of it, restore another version first; the one you had is then an earlier version and can be deleted.

What redrawing does not do

Worth saying plainly, because it is the thing people fear:

Moving or deleting a wall never deletes a place, and never unhangs a work.

If you delete a wall that “East wall” was on, “East wall” still exists and every piece recorded there is still recorded there. The place simply has no spot on the drawing until you give it one — it reads as unplaced.

Your room is allowed to change. Your catalog is not thrown away when it does.

If it goes wrong

The Floor plan tab shows the drawing but no tools. Your account can look but not change. Ask an administrator at your gallery. You can still zoom, move around, preview versions and print.

My wall will not go to the angle I want. A wall goes at any angle, but its ends land on grid points, so a very short wall can only take a few angles. Zoom in: the grid gets finer (down to one square), and the end can go where you want it. If a corner jumps further than you expect, you are zoomed out and it is snapping to the heavy lines every 10 squares. Or type the corner’s coordinates instead — see Typing a wall in squares.

The line starts somewhere other than where I clicked. That was a bug in the way the pointer was mapped onto the sheet when the drawing area was wider than it was tall, fixed in 1.441.0, and it stays right at every zoom. If you still see it, reload the page.

I pressed “Finish wall” and got told a wall needs a start and an end. A wall needs at least two clicks, an area at least three. Click again, then finish — or click the first point to close the shape.

I dragged a wall and the view moved instead. The wall was not picked. Click it first; then a drag moves it.

There is no Delete button on a version. Only an administrator can delete versions, and never the current one.

Two places on the same wall face. Not allowed, and refused with a message. One face is one place — otherwise “what is on the east wall?” has two answers, which is the problem places were created to solve. Take the first place off that spot before putting another there.

I named the wrong face. Click the name, take it off the plan, then name the right one. Nothing about the place or its artwork is affected.

Save is greyed out. Nothing has changed since the last save.

Reading the room

Once walls are drawn and named, Artwork Catalog → What hangs where turns the plan into a way of answering two questions.

What is on this wall? Click a face and the works on it are listed — thumbnail, title, artist and status. Only works still in the gallery are listed and counted: a work sold at the desk and taken home, one recorded Off the floor, or one that is archived is left out, even if it still records the place it hung on. A work sold online and not yet collected stays on its wall. The printed plan follows the same rule.

What hangs nowhere? The tray beside the plan lists every work that is not on the drawing. Two kinds end up there, and the second is easy to miss:

• works with no place at all
• works whose place exists but is not on the drawing — you created the place but never named a wall with it, or a redraw removed the wall it was on

Without that second kind, the plan would look complete while describing half your collection.

The tray lists only works that are in the gallery and could be hung. It leaves out a piece that was sold at the desk and taken home by the buyer, an archived piece, a piece recorded as off the gallery floor (taken down or returned to the artist), and a departed member’s pieces. These are the same pieces the printed pick list leaves out. A piece sold online stays in the tray until it is collected or shipped, because it is still in the building.

Finding works in the tray

A gallery can have hundreds of works in the tray, so you can narrow it down:

• Artist shows only one artist’s works. Each artist is listed with how many of their works are in the tray.
• The Title or SKU box searches as you type.

The two work together: choose an artist, then type part of a title to find one of their pieces. The heading still counts the whole tray, and a line under the filters says how many works match. If there are more than fit, press Show more.

Moving a work

Press Place it in the tray, then click the face it should hang on. To move something already hanging, open its face and press Move, then click the new place. Take off returns a work to the tray. You never have to open the artwork form.

Placing several works at once

1. In the tray, tick the works you want to hang, or tick Select all shown to pick every work the filter is showing. The tray shows how many are selected.
2. Press Place selected.
3. Click the wall side or area they should go on, or pick it from the Choose a place list. The list offers only places that are on the current plan.
4. Check the question (for example Place 12 pieces on East wall?) and press Confirm, or press Cancel to stop.

The plan and the tray update, and a note says how many works were placed. If any work could not be placed, the note names it by title and SKU and says why. For example, the piece was sold at the desk, is archived, is off the gallery floor, or belongs to a member whose membership has ended. Press Dismiss to close the note.

To move several works that are already hanging, click their face. In the list, narrow it down with the Artist filter and the Title or SKU box if you need to, then tick the works or tick Select all shown:

• Move selected moves them to another place. Pick the new place the same way as above and press Confirm.
• Take off the wall sends them all back to the tray in one step.

Only people who can place a single work can place several at once, and each change is recorded in the activity log.

Pinning a work to its spot on a long wall

A long wall is still one place: the gallery does not split “West wall” into smaller places. To say where along it a work hangs, give the work a pin.

1. Open the wall’s face on What hangs where.
2. Press Pin on the work, then click the spot on that wall where it hangs. A small dot marks it.
3. To move it, drag the dot along the wall, or press Move pin and click the new spot. With the keyboard, select the dot with Tab and use the arrow keys. Remove pin takes the pin away.

A pinned work is described by the nearest landmark on the plan, automatically: West wall · near the Jewelry case. The landmark is the closest area you drew (a desk, plinth, case, door or walkway). An area you named as a place reads by that name (“the Jewelry case”); an area with no place reads by its kind (“the door”). If no area is within about 8 squares, the work reads just West wall. Rename or move a landmark and every description near it changes with it.

Works without a pin read just the place name, as before.

The description shows in What hangs where, under Where it hangs on the artwork (Pinned: West wall · near the Jewelry case.), on the printed pick list and on the printed plan, where each pin is a small dot on its wall.

A pin belongs to the wall side, not to a spot on the page:

• Edit the wall — move or lengthen it — and the pin stays the same share of the way along it. Putting a corner into a different side does not move it.
• Move the work to another place, press Take off, Move selected or Take off the wall, or record it Off the floor, and its pin is removed. Place it again, then pin it again.
• Put the place itself on a different wall side (on the Floor plan tab) and the pins on it are removed, because they would mark spots on a wall the works are not on.

A pin can only go on the side the work’s place is on, and only on a wall — not on an area. Pinning several works: place them first (one at a time, or several at once), then pin each.

Pinning is for the same people who can place a work; a viewer sees the dots and the descriptions but cannot move them. Every pin change is recorded in the activity log.

How full a wall is

Each face shows something like 4 of 4. The capacity is estimated from how long the wall is drawn — roughly one work every three squares — unless you type a number on the Places tab, which always wins. Because the plan is a sketch and not to scale, type the number if the estimate looks wrong.

Over capacity is shown, never refused. If you hang eleven small works on a short wall, the face says 11 of 2 (over) and shades differently. That is a description, not a complaint: the software does not tell you how to hang.

The count is always printed, so the plan reads correctly in greyscale and if you cannot tell the shades apart.

Printing the plan

Press ⎙ Print — it is on the Floor plan tab and on What hangs where — and the plan downloads as a PDF (floor-plan.pdf); open it and print it for the desk.

The PDF is made from the saved plan. If you press ⎙ Print on the Floor plan tab with changes that are not saved yet, it asks first: Save and print, Print the saved plan, or Cancel.

Print size. Next to ⎙ Print is a choice of size:

• Fit to page — the whole plan on one page, at a stated scale (below).
• Graph paper size — drawn at exactly the size of 10 x 10 to the inch graph paper: one square is 0.1 inch (2.54 mm), and ten squares — one heavy square — are 1 inch (25.4 mm). Printed at 100%, the sheet lays over your graph paper square for square: a room 50 squares wide is 5 inches wide. The sheet says Print at 100% / Actual size - do not scale to fit. and carries a small bar marked 1 in = 10 squares: put a ruler on it to check the printer did not shrink the page. Choose Actual size (or 100%) in the print dialog, never “fit to page”.

Graph paper size is always one Letter page. If the plan is too big for a page at true size — wider than about 64 squares or taller than about 68, counting a little margin — it is drawn smaller so the whole plan fits, still with a heavy line every 10 squares. The sheet then says the scale it was drawn at, for example Scaled to fit: 1 in = 16 squares (not true size), the ruler bar is labelled at that scale (1 in = 16 squares), and there is no “Print at 100%” note: a scaled sheet does not lay over the graph paper. A room 50 squares wide and 110 high is one of these — at true size it would be over 11 inches tall.

The screen is not true size (screens differ), so compare the paper with the printout, not with the monitor.

What comes out:

• Sheet one is the drawing. With Fit to page it is fitted to one page at Letter or A4, with the scale stated on it: Scale: 1 inch = 8 squares, say. That is the scale the sheet is drawn at; print at actual size (not “fit to page”) and a ruler on the paper will agree with it. Each named face carries a short number in a circle rather than its name, so the labels stay legible where two faces are close together — the inside of a small island, for instance.
• Then one list per face: the number, the full name of the place, and every work on it — SKU, title, artist and year, status. A pinned work also says where along the wall it is (West wall · near the Jewelry case), and its pin is a small dot on the drawing. A long list that runs over a page repeats its heading on the next page, and no row is ever split across the break.
• A Not on the drawing section for places that hold works but have no spot on the plan, and a line saying how many works hang nowhere, with their titles.
• The same grid as on screen, with a heavier line every 10 squares and the numbers along the top and left edges, so a printout can be compared with the graph paper.
• Everything is black and grey. It prints the same on whatever is in the office.

The sheet also says, in one line, Drawn from the gallery’s layout sketch; distances are approximate. The plan is a sketch, so the scale is honest about what it is: the ratio the drawing was made at, not a survey of the room.

If nothing is drawn yet, the PDF still comes out — one sheet saying so — rather than an error. A plan with named faces and nothing hung prints every face with Nothing hangs here yet.

Who can print. The same people who can see the plan: signed-in staff of your gallery with access to the artwork catalog. There is no public link to the PDF and nothing is stored — it is a print of the room as it stands when you press the button.

Related

• Places: where a work hangs
• The artist roster and contact list