Annotations¶
One of the big benefits of creating your own maps — even for games featuring in-game auto-maps — is the ability to annotate them. There are two types of annotations available: notes and labels.
Notes¶
A note is a textual comment linked to a cell. Notes can optionally have a marker, which is some symbol that is displayed in the cell. There are four marker types to choose from:
Examples of the four different marker types
- None
No marker; only a little triangle is displayed in the top-right corner of the cell.
- Number
An automatically incrementing number. The background colour can be chosen from four predefined colours.
Numbers are assigned in left-to-right, top-to-bottom order (normal English reading order). Numbering restarts from
1in each level. Notes are renumbered automatically whenever a new numbered item is added, or an existing one is deleted.- ID
An identifier of up to two characters in length consisting of English letters and numbers.
- Icon
An icon chosen from a predefined set of 40 icons.
Annotation icon set
To create a note, press the N key in a non-empty cell. A cell cannot have more than one note; if you press N in a cell that already has one, you’ll be editing it. To erase a note, press Shift+N.
Press Shift+Enter to insert line breaks when editing the note text.
If the cell’s floor is non-empty (e.g. it contains a pressure plate or a teleport), placing a note of type Number, ID or Icon will clear its content. If you want to preserve the cell’s content, use the None marker type, which will only display a little triangle in the top-right corner of the cell while keeping its content intact.
Conversely, if you overwrite a note of type Number, ID or Icon with some cell content (e.g. a teleport), the note won’t be deleted, but it will be converted to the None marker type, so the new cell content and the note can coexist.
The note under the cursor is displayed in the notes pane below the level, which can be toggled with Alt+N. You can also hover over a cell with the mouse pointer, and if it has a note, it will be displayed in a tooltip. This tooltip can also be toggled with Space for the cell under the cursor.
Tip
As creating and editing notes are very frequently used actions, special care has been taken to make the note dialog fully keyboard operable.
Hold down Ctrl and use the horizontal movement keys to navigate between the tabs, or press the number keys 1 to 4 to jump to a specific tab.
To cycle between text fields, use Tab and Shift+Tab. In the Number and Icon tabs, use the movement keys to select the colour or the icon image, respectively.
Tip
Hovering over the annotations with the mouse is the quickest way to find a note by its text in a busy map.
Labels¶
A label is just some text overlaid on top of the level. Placing a label in a cell overwrites its previous content, including notes (technically, a label is just another annotation type). In contrast with notes, you can attach labels to empty cells as well. This is useful when placing labels in empty areas around the level, rather than on top of it.
Example use of labels — note that all but one reside in empty areas around the level
To create a label starting from a cell, go to the cell and press Ctrl+T. You can select the colour of the label from four predefined colours.
To edit a label, go to the cell at the top-left corner of the label text, then press Ctrl+T. To erase it, press Shift+T.
Note
The excavate (draw tunnel) tool (D modifier) does not erase labels, but the erase cell (E) and draw/clear floor (F) tools do.