Landscape Design Software - Plant Label Wizard

Landscape Design Software

Plant Label Wizard

The Plant Label Wizard adds plant labels to the plan view. This can save you a lot of time when working with complex landscape designs.

The wizard will prompt you for basic information such as what you want the labels to contain, font type and size, and alignment options. It then creates the labels and adds them to a layer named Auto Plant Labels.

Important: Any labels that already exist in the layer named Auto Plant Labels will be deleted. This makes it easier to run the wizard multiple times without worrying about deleting the old labels first. However, if you make any changes that you want to keep, be sure to move them to another layer before running the wizard again.

To add plant labels using the Plant Label Wizard:

1. Select Tools > Plant Label Wizard.

2. Click Next. The following dialog will appear.

Common Name
Check this option if you want the label to contain the plant's common name.

Botanical Name
Check this option if you want the label to contain the plant's botanical name.

Plant key
Check this option if you want the label to contain the plant key.

Quantity
Check this option if you want the label to contain the number of plants the label is pointing to.

Font
Choose the font you want to use for the label text.

Style
Choose the font style you want to use for the label text.

Height
Height of the label text in world units.

Add to left/right side
Check these options if you want labels added to the left and/or right sides of your landscape design.

Distance from left/right edge
Space between the left/right edge of your landscape design and the labels.

Maximum distance between identical plants
This determines how close identical plants need to be in order for them to be get a single label. See below for more information.

3. Set the desired options and click Next.

4. Click Finish to finish the wizard and add the labels.

Using the "Maximum distance between identical plants" option

This option is a great way to prevent the wizard from adding too many labels for the same plant. For example, the following landscape has three tea olives that are about 6' apart. The maximum distance option was set to 5' and the labels were added using the wizard.

The following is the same design but with the maximum distance option set to 10', resulting in a much cleaner design. (Notice how the label indicates how many plants it is referring to. Be sure to check the Quantity option if you want this number to appear.)

Preventing Labels for Certain Plants

You can prevent labels from being added for certain plants. For example, you might only want to show labels for new plants, not ones that already exist on your client's property. Of course, you could simply delete the unwanted labels after running the wizard, but it's faster to prevent the wizard from adding them in the first place.

To prevent the wizard from adding labels for certain plants:

1. Select the plant(s) you do not want the wizard to add labels for.

2. Right-click and select Advanced Object Properties.

3. Uncheck the option Include in Project Material List and click OK.

Important: This will also prevent the plant from appearing in the Plant Legend and Project Material List.

Tips:

• If you only want one label to appear for each type of plant, set the maximum distance option to a very large value, such as the size of your landscape.

• The labels added by the wizard can edited just like the ones you add manually. Also, they are not tied to the plants, so if you change any of the plants then you will either need to manually change the labels or re-run the wizard.

• The wizard will set the current layer to Auto Plant Labels when it finishes. When you are done changing the labels and want to work on other areas of your landscape design, be sure to select the layer you want to work with.

• To undo the wizard, click Edit > Undo. This is useful if you accidentally placed other labels in the Auto Plant Labels layer which were then deleted by the wizard.