Currently, Archicad's Drawing Frame crops everything indiscriminately, including model geometry, dimensions, labels, and section markers.
I would like to have separate, independently adjustable Model Crop and Annotation Crop regions.
In architectural documentation, annotations frequently need to extend beyond the boundaries of the geometry being represented. Being able to crop a plan or section tightly while keeping dimensions, labels, and markers visible outside that boundary would greatly improve the flexibility and clarity of layouts.
But there are also less obvious situations where the current limitation creates a genuine paradox.
Here's a practical example:
I'm working on a basement floor plan with a corresponding section placed directly above it on the same layout. For graphical consistency, both drawings must have exactly the same width and remain perfectly aligned.
To achieve this, the source section line must extend across the full width of the plan. As a consequence, its marker heads fall outside the plan's cropped boundaries.
This leaves me with three options:
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Keep the drawings aligned: the section marker heads get cropped and disappear.
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Enlarge the plan's drawing frame to reveal the markers: the plan becomes wider than the section, ruining their graphical alignment.
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Shorten the source section line to fit the markers inside the plan: the actual section becomes narrower, again ruining the alignment.
In other words, I cannot simultaneously maintain the alignment of the drawings and display the section markers correctly.
The proposed solution is simple: allow annotations to extend beyond the model crop, within a separately adjustable annotation crop region.
Yes, workarounds exist: creating irregular drawing frames, overlapping multiple drawings, or hiding the source section marker and replacing it with a separately placed linked marker.
But having to maintain additional markers or drawings simply to achieve the correct graphical presentation introduces unnecessary complexity into what should be a straightforward documentation task.
For a mature BIM application, the extent of visible model geometry should not dictate the extent of visible annotations.
Submitted