Draw your own markup tool, from a symbol to a patterned line like a silt fence.
The Tool Designer makes a tool that draws a shape the built-in tools do not have: a silt fence with its posts, a north arrow, a lettered punch key, a symbol that stamps at a fixed size. A designed tool lives in the Tool Chest like any other saved tool and is drawn on the sheet the same way.
The design fixes the gesture as well as the shape. A tool is one of four:
| Drawn by | Suits |
|---|---|
| A freehand drag | A line following a boundary: a silt fence, a tree line. |
| A box drag | A shape filling whatever you drag: a hatched area, a bordered note. |
| Clicked points | A run with corners: a fence following a property line. |
| A single click | A symbol at a fixed size: a benchmark, a bubble. |
A single-click tool carries its own placement size, which is why it appears at a usable size from one click rather than needing a drag.
The tool's shape is a drawing rather than a setting: an outline you supply, fitted to whatever you draw on the sheet. Static text can be baked into it at a fixed place and size, which is how a punch key carries its letter and a bubble its number.
Line ends take the same nine ending styles the built-in linear tools use, so a designed leader can carry an arrowhead.
A designed line can repeat a small motif along its length, which is what turns a plain line into a silt fence or a barbed boundary.
There is also a Cloud edge style, which draws the same scalloped outline the built-in revision clouds use rather than a repeating motif. With it, Size is the scallop radius directly.
Spacing is not cosmetic. At zero the pattern stretches to meet itself along each segment; above zero each repeat keeps its exact size and the remainder is drawn as plain line. A silt fence needs the second behaviour, because the gaps between its posts are the pattern.
A copy of a built-in drawn tool can be opened in the designer, which seeds the design from that tool's current look. Saving it makes it a designed tool from then on, so the copy stops being a plain rectangle and becomes whatever you designed.
Not every tool can be designed. Where the option is unavailable, the tool has no geometry a design could replace, such as a text or text-markup tool.