Ballooning a print
Last updated 6 August 2026
Ballooning is where a plan starts. Every characteristic on the control plan and every row on AS9102 Form 3 comes from a balloon you placed, so this is the only part of the job you do by hand twice.
Getting a drawing in
- Drag a file onto the plans page drop zone, or onto the empty drawing panel inside a plan.
- PNG, JPG, GIF, WEBP, BMP and SVG are used as they are.
- A PDF has its first page rendered to a high-resolution image in your browser. Only the first page: split a multi-sheet print and add the sheets as separate pages.
- The file is read locally. No drawing is uploaded at any point.
Pages
A revision holds as many drawing pages as you need. The strip along the bottom of the drawing panel adds, removes, renames and reorders them.
Every balloon and annotation belongs to a page. Clicking a characteristic row jumps the drawing to the page its balloon is on, so a five-sheet print does not mean hunting.
The tools
| Tool | What it does |
|---|---|
| Select | Pick balloons and annotations to move or delete. |
| Balloon | Click the drawing to place a balloon. |
| Text | Click to add a text annotation, which opens straight into editing. |
| Whiteout | Click and drag to cover part of the drawing. |
The panel has a View and an Edit mode. View locks the markup so a stray click or a Delete key cannot move or remove anything, which is the mode to be in when you are reading rather than authoring. Entering Edit arms Select rather than Balloon, so the first click after switching cannot drop a balloon you did not want.
Zoom and pan
- The mouse wheel zooms between one and twelve times, centered on the pointer.
- Middle-mouse drag pans.
- Auto-fit is on by default and keeps the whole sheet in view. Zoom and pan are available once you turn it off.
Balloon and text size
The steppers beside the tools change balloon and annotation size in ten percent increments between fifty and two hundred percent. Size is stored as a proportion of the drawing width rather than in pixels, so a balloon that reads well on a B-size sheet still reads well on a D-size one. The setting belongs to the revision, so it survives being reopened.
Labels
Balloon labels are sequential numbers. The next label is one past the highest number already used, so deleting balloon 4 out of six leaves the next new one as 7 rather than reusing 4. You can type a label of your own; it is trimmed and upper-cased so that d1 and D1 do not become two different characteristics.
Placing a balloon for a row that already exists
- Click the characteristic's row, in the Control Plan tab, the Power Editor or the rail. The row is now armed.
- Click the drawing where the balloon belongs.
Hovering a row flashes its balloon, and hovering a balloon flashes its row, which is the fastest way to check a print somebody else ballooned.
What you see at each operation
The drawing shows the balloons for characteristics inspected at the operation you are looking at, so an operator's sheet is not cluttered with features checked somewhere else. The Power Editor shows all of them.
Ballooning inside the new-plan wizard
The wizard has a step that gives the drawing the whole window and locks the tool to Balloon. Here, placing a balloon also creates the characteristic row, which is much faster than adding rows and placing balloons as two passes.
- Number keys 1 to 6 choose the kind about to be placed: dimension, thread, GD&T, basic, finish, note.
- Shift plus the mouse wheel cycles the same list.
- A pill beside the cursor shows what is armed.