Markup Board

Some things are far quicker to point at than to describe. The markup board puts a picture in front of you — a live screenshot of your CAD window, an image, a page of a PDF drawing, or blank grid paper — lets you draw on it, and sends it to CoPilot as your next message.

Opening a board

Three ways in:

From the desktop agent — the balloon's right-click menu, the chat card's header button, or the quick-ask bar's button.
From your CAD system's CoPilot ribbon.
By asking, in the chat:

Open a markup board on a screenshot of the model

Open a markup board on C:\drawings\frame-assembly.pdf

When CoPilot opens a board for you, it will stop and wait for you. That is deliberate: a conversation that sat blocked on a human would hold the CAD and everything queued behind it. Draw, then press Submit — the board arrives as your next message and the conversation carries on from there.

What you can draw

Freehand ink — pen colour and thickness, and an eraser.
Text, placed where you put it.
Arrows and shapes.
Undo — one stack covering everything, including a change of background.

An Even width option is on by default. It stops a stylus tapering a stroke with pen pressure, which in a markup reads as a mistake rather than as expression. Mouse users see no difference either way.

What you can draw on

A live CAD screenshot

The board opens on a capture of your CAD window, zoomed to fit. This is the one that unlocks the next section.

An image

Open, drag and drop, or paste a path. A photograph, a scan, a sketch on paper.

A PDF page

Engineering drawings usually arrive as PDFs, so a PDF page becomes the background directly — it is a drawing to mark up, not a sticker to place. Page Down and Page Up turn the page, and a multi-page PDF always says which page it is showing, both on screen and in the message that reaches CoPilot (“drawing.pdf page 1 of 12”) — submitting page 1 of a drawing set without saying so would be a lie by omission.

The PDF is redrawn, not rasterised by a full PDF engine. Paths, text and embedded images are replayed faithfully; clipping paths, shading patterns, transparency groups and blend modes are ignored, and a glyph is drawn in the nearest installed font rather than the one embedded in the file. For marking up a drawing this is more than enough — for a colour-critical proof it is not.

Grid paper

A square or isometric grid to sketch an idea on from nothing. It behaves exactly like any other background.

A new background is a new subject. Opening a different screenshot, or turning to the next PDF page, clears the markup — strokes drawn over one picture point at nothing on another. It goes through the same undo stack, so Ctrl+Z brings them back if you did not mean it.

Submitting

Press Submit. The board is flattened to a PNG and attached to a chat message exactly as if you had attached it with the paperclip, so history, retry and the conversation queue all behave normally. The message carries your note, a line naming the board and what it was drawn on, and — when the background was a CAD screenshot — which CAD session it came from.

A written description of the markup travels with the picture: the text you typed and where, the arrows and what they point from and to, the corners of shapes, the extent of each stroke, all in board pixels. That description goes whether or not the answering model can see images, because seeing a picture does not give you pixel coordinates — and coordinates are what the next step needs.

Turning a circle into a face

This is the part that is worth learning. When the board's background is a CAD screenshot, CoPilot can convert a point you drew on into a point in the model, cast a ray from the camera through it, and tell you which face you circled.

What is the face I circled in red, and what is its area?

Circle a boss on a screenshot of your model, add a note, submit, and you can then say “shell that face to 2 mm” or “how thick is that wall?” without ever giving a coordinate.

Two honest caveats:

It needs the CAD system to report where its camera was. All five report it, each verified against its own picture. When a board is opened on a screenshot, it says up front whether picking is available, so nobody has to try one to find out. A perspective camera is refused — a pixel on a perspective view is not one point in the model — and a missing camera reads as “no camera”, never as a default one.
AutoCAD cannot answer the face question. The camera is reported correctly and the board works normally, but the underlying face lookup is not implemented for AutoCAD, so a pick there always comes back with no face. Mark up AutoCAD drawings for discussion, not for picking.

Every step of the pick refuses by name rather than guessing, because this is the kind of failure that would otherwise be silent: a transform that is slightly wrong still returns a face, confidently, and it is the wrong one. A point outside the board is refused rather than clamped to the edge; a point where the picture is blank comes back as “no face found”.

Good uses for it

Circle a wall and ask whether it is too thin.
Arrow two edges and ask for the distance between them.
Mark up a supplier's PDF drawing with what you want changed, and ask CoPilot to list the changes.
Sketch a profile on grid paper and ask for it as a part.
Point at the one component in a large assembly you cannot name.