TPC 2026 - Drawing

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Working With a TPC Drawing

Think of a drawing as a picture or map of your geospatial data that you will use internally or deliver to a client.

•For a survey, it might be a control diagram or a finished plat.

•For a city planner, it might be a drawing of a proposed easement.

•For a forester, it might be a unit boundary drawn over a calibrated background photo.

Let's take a look at what's in a drawing. If you are a former CAD user, some of this, like layers, will be familiar, but the rest of it, like Survey Objects will not be. That's what this topic is about.

Objects - Survey or Manually Drawn

Survey Objects

Most of the objects in a drawing will come from the survey data. These are Survey Objects derived from a tagged traverse or surface. You tag the traverses you want to include in the drawing in the Traverses Manager and you tag the surfaces you want to include in the drawing in the Surfaces Manager. Tagged items then draw themselves in the drawing by creating Survey Objects.

Survey Object Properties

Survey objects derive their properties (color, line type, point symbol, etc) from their respective Traverse Drawing Settings or Surface Drawing Settings. Once created however, you are free to modify an objects individual attributes as needed. If you want a particular line to be thicker, just make it thicker. The idea here is to let Quick View control as many of the object attributes via their corresponding settings to make drawing fast and efficient. But you still have the flexibility to change whatever you want. See Traverse vs Object Settings.

Manually Drawn Objects

These are objects you have drawn yourself or imported from a CAD file. They are lines, arcs, polylines, rectangles, circles, offsets, etc.

TPC includes many CAD tools like trimming, breaking and extending a line, inserting a fillet or chamfer, etc. These all work on drawn objects.

Space - Survey or Paper

Survey Space

Survey Space objects have survey coordinates and can be scaled within a drawing. They are your lines, points, lot labels, contour lines, etc. Most Survey Space objects in a drawing are created automatically from survey data, but you can add your own survey space objects manually.

See Paper Space vs Survey Space.

Paper Space

Paper Space objects are tied to the nearest corner of the drawing page. A Paper Space object would know, for instance, that it is 1 inch down and 2 inches over from the upper left corner of the drawing. Changing the drawing size doesn't change the Paper Space coordinates.

Layers

TPC doesn't rely on layers like CAD programs do, but includes them so that TPC can work with CAD files. There are also some benefits to having layers, like turning off all the point labels in a drawing just by turning off their layer. TPC support all the most common layer functions like On/Off, Freeze/Thaw, Lock/Unlock, etc.

Settings - Drawing, Surface or Traverse

Drawing Settings

Drawing Settings are those that are applied globally to a drawing. If you change the line type used to draw leaders, all the leaders change to reflect the new line type. Objects you manually insert like dimensions and dynamic offsets have Drawing Settings.

Surface Settings

Each surface determines how it will be drawn in a drawing through it's Surface Settings. These include contour lines, slope shading and more.

Traverse Drawing Settings

Traverse Drawing Settings control how a traverse is drawn, including control points, side shots, lot labels, fills, curves and lot labels.