Introduction

The marker tool is a useful tool to highlight the span direction of an element like CLT element or metal grating. By selecting a face of the part you can easily place an arrow and useful information in the model.

Install the Marker tool from the Tekla Warehouse.

To use the tool run it in the application & component catalog and select a face of a part. Enable the direct manipulation in Tekla Structures to place and rotate the arrow in the desired direction by using the arrow handles or by using the contextual toolbar to quickly rotate the arrow 90 degrees.

Dialog

In the dialog there are 3 main sections. To define the marker arrow and to define the marker attributes.

Arrow

In the arrow section you can define how the arrow will appear in the model. You can create the arrow as a beam object, an item, or a custom part.

Use the option Direction to automatically align the marker tool with timber objects created (see Tekla Warehouse).

Marker attributes

Besides the arrow the marker tool also allows you also to insert useful information to the model in text format or as intelligent custom parts. These attributes can be added be selecting the property and ‘Add’. All elements in the list will create text in the model except for the element “custom part”.

Text attributes

In the text section of the dialog you can define the text font, sizes and alignments. The text is created as contour plates for which you can set the settings in settings.

For the placement of the text attributes use 2 distance fields

A: Vertical positioning. You can add a list of distances. The list order matches the element order in the that are defined.

B: horizontal positioning. Here you can specify the horizontal placement of all the text elements. Note only one value can be set here.

Custom part

In the marker attributes you can pick “Custom part”. Using this you can input an additional custom part that is needed to show additional flexible content.

Define the component, the preferred settings and the positioning of the custom part.

If there are any specific attributes you want to manipulate from within the marker tool you can define the attribute of your custom part component and set the type to Template attributes, String, Integer, or Double. When type is String, Integer, or Double you can define the needed value straight away in the Value field.

When type is Template attribute, you can define the part property or user defined attribute you want the content be taken from. See example below.

Create parts as

Specify if the objects created by the marker tool are part of the assembly or loose parts. Note that making the parts parts of the assembly can affect numbering.