topic I'm total novice migrating from Allplan to Acrhcad and need some help setting up my enviroment in Documentation

I'm total novice migrating from Allplan to Acrhcad and need some help setting up my enviroment

dc73 — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 00:41:07 GMT

Hello!

After almost 30 years working with Allplan, due to new circumstances, I will have to start to use Archicad and have some questions about settings and would like your help.

If it's OK, I will use this post to ask basic questions so I don't clog the forum.

If this isn't the right place for this question, please move it where it belongs.

1. Is there a setting where I can set it so all the text (and I mean text from anything like dimensions, regular text, or anything else) is always displayed no matter how far I zoom out? Now, when I zoom out, at some point, text is replaced by colored squares.

Operating system used: Windows 11

Re: I'm total novice migrating from Allplan to Acrhcad and need some help setting up my enviroment

Barry Kelly — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 00:48:02 GMT

Please try to post in a relevant section of the forums rather than 'General Discussions'.

TIP, if you can't find a label that refers to your topic or have to use 'Other', you possibly are in the wrong forum.

And in answer to your question.

Not that I am aware of.

It depends on your screen size and resolution.

Below a certain on screen size, it will revert to a simple rectangle.

You can still edit the text and the editor will be full size, but of course you can't see the text to know if you need to edit it.

Barry.

Re: I'm total novice migrating from Allplan to Acrhcad and need some help setting up my enviroment

AllanP — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 04:35:45 GMT

setting up your work environment:

go to menu Options->Work Environment -> Work Environment...

The top group of the list is the Combination of work Environment "Combinations" that you use

You can set up Custom Keyboard Shortcuts, data safety settings, onscreen display preferences, how the mouse works (click click or click and hold), screen gravity, custom tool bars, custom menus locations of open pallets, what pallets are open/closed when opening a file, etc.

you can save these preferences for each group of settings.

in my case, i have different pallet layouts for different screen sizes

i.e. when I have to do presentations of TV's in board rooms the screen often doesn't support bigger screen sizes, but i still need all the pallets in usable places when working.

The User preferences Schemes can be stored, and the stored scheme will remember all the sub items settings.

the user preferences are to do with display and interaction things.

Company Standards deal with the "Recovery Autosave" if the file crashes.

there is no actual "Autosave".

YOU MUST REMEBER TO SAVE at the end of the day or you will lose all the work you have done

Shortcuts allow you to attach short cut keys to commands.

it also allows you to display all the current shortcut keys in a web browser.

This will include any shortcuts that you customize.

you can then copy the contents of you web browser output, and paste it into an excel spreadsheet.

then "fit to column" the spreadsheet, and you have a fixed record of you current keyboard shortcuts.

Tool scheme allows you to customize information displayed in toolbox, tool box info pallets, and tool settings dialogues.

Workspace Schemes remembers where you pallets, toolbars and the toolbox, etc.. are on screen, and which ones are open or closed.

Command Layout and Schemes allows you to customize what is in menus, and allows you to make custom toolbars.

i like to go to the "user manual" pdf which has full description of all the different settings and what they do.

Work environment starts page 201 of this manual.

https://help.graphisoft.com/AC/29/INT/Archicad.pdf

or the web version

General Help;

https://help.graphisoft.com/AC/29/INT/#t=_AC29_Help%2F001_GettingHelp%2F001_GettingHelp-1.htm

Work Environment Help;

https://help.graphisoft.com/AC/29/INT/#t=_AC29_Help%2F020_Configuration%2F020_Configuration-14.htm

too much info to put in my reply.

I hope this helps.

P.S. I don't think there is an option to stop the onscreen displayed text to not go to the blank block, but i may be wrong...

Re: I'm total novice migrating from Allplan to Acrhcad and need some help setting up my enviroment

Rubia Torres — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 08:24:27 GMT

Hi @dc73,

FYI, Archicad switches text to blurred rectangles when you zoom far out because the text would be small to read and slow to render, which would hurt performance and create visual noise. Archicad uses simplified blocks as a level-of-detail optimization, so you still see where annotations are but the navigation remains fast and clean.