The true north marker

Annotation ▸ 🧭 True north marker puts a north point on the drawing. It is a drawing annotation, not site geometry: there is one per drawing, it appears on the 2D plan and the sketch only, and it takes no part in any measurement, check or export of quantities.

Placing it

Picking the tool opens a chooser: the three arrows drawn as they will appear, a rotation field and a size, and True north to put the bearing back to 0°. Place it puts it on the plan with those settings, and 🎨 Arrow… on the north bar reopens the chooser at any time.

Click anywhere to move it, or drag it — from the tool or from Edit. Delete removes it, and undo brings it back.

Arrow, size and bearing

Three arrows ship: a solid needle, an open arrow and a compass rose. Size scales the marker, and it is drawn at a constant size on screen — a north arrow that shrank as you zoomed out would be no use on a plan.

Rotation is a bearing in degrees, clockwise, and you can type an exact figure. 0° is true north, straight up, which is what a site traced from the map already is: the tiles are north-up by construction. Set the figure when you are working over a survey drawn on a grid bearing. True north puts it back to 0° without touching the size or the arrow. Whatever the bearing, the N stays upright — it labels the arrow, it is not part of it.

Your own north arrow

On the paid plans, Use my own arrow… in the chooser takes an SVG or a DXF block from your CAD package and uses that instead. Those are the only two formats accepted, the file must be under 2 MB, and a DXF is read at the moment you upload it — so a block it cannot parse is refused there and then rather than appearing blank on the drawing. On a free plan the button is greyed and tells you what it unlocks rather than simply not working. A CAD block is centred and scaled to the marker's own size, so a block drawn at any scale lands the same size on the plan. The three built-in arrows are on every plan.