Creating a feature by drawing freehand

The Freehand tool allows you to create lines that follow the movement of your pointer. The segments are smoothed into Bézier curves when you finish the shape. For this reason, the Freehand tool is most useful when making quick, free-form design notes (redlining), such as indicating a study area on a map.

If you want to create freehand polygons that adjoin each other, you can use the Auto-Complete Freehand tool. This tool allows you to use a freehand drawing to append a new polygon to the boundary of an existing polygon.

The following keyboard shortcuts are available with the Freehand tool:

Keyboard shortcut	Editing function
SPACEBAR	Snap to an existing feature.
M	Draw a freehand line by holding down the left mouse button while dragging. This is most useful for tablet computing since it allows you to digitize when the pen is pressed down and stop when you lift up the pen.

Freehand and Auto-Complete Freehand tool keyboard shortcuts

Steps:

1. These steps can be used to create lines or polygons:
   • To create lines, click a line feature template in the Create Features window.
   • To create polygons, click a polygon feature template in the Create Features window.
2. Click the Freehand tool on the Create Features window.
3. Click the map to start the freehand drawing.
4. Drag the pointer in the shape you want. Hold down the SPACEBAR to snap to an existing feature.
5. Click the map once to finish drawing the freehand shape and create the feature; you do not need to double-click as you normally would to finish a sketch. The freehand drawing line is automatically smoothed into Bézier curves.
Tip:

If you are creating a polygon, it is closed to form a continuous ring. If you click the map to stop sketching just before reaching the original start point, you can avoid creating an extraneous multipart polygon where the polygon closes. If you do overshoot the start point, double-click the feature with the Edit tool and delete the extra vertices.