Annotations in the Rhino BETA now support a number of new frame shapes for text, leaders, and dimension masks, plus a transparency control for solid-color mask fills.
You can now frame or “balloon” your annotation text in a Rectangle, Rounded Rectangle, Circle, Capsule, Hex Capsule, Diamond, Triangle, or Hexagon. These frame shapes are available anywhere a mask can be applied: Text objects, Leaders, and Dimensions.
Masks using a solid color fill also now have a transparency slider in the color picker, so you can dial in exactly how much of the drawing shows through behind your callout.
This feature was added in an effort to help with visually organizing designs, making detailed callouts, adding revision balloons, along with a variety of other use cases. Now this can be done seamlessly from within the existing toolsets used for annotations, dimensions, text, etc. Rather than adding one bespoke “balloon” tool, we expanded the existing mask/frame system so every annotation type gets the same set of shapes and the same color/transparency control.
Try it out…
Draw a Leader, Text, or Dimension object.
Open its Properties, or use Edit Leader, and pick a frame shape from the mask dropdown.
Adjust the mask color’s transparency slider to your liking.
I’ve drawn a simple Leader. Just two clicks - arrowhead and end of tail. Then call up the Edit Leader dialogue and pick a “Circle frame”. First thing that looks a bit odd is that the leader stops short of the circle. How do I fix this?
I get that the Mask margin controls the size of the Frame, but changing the text height also scales it. How are the two related? For some of my clients, I have to set specific text heights and the balloon (circle) is also defined as a proportion of the font height. It would be useful to know how this is controlled in Rhino.
After playing around with the edit point for the arrowhead, I’d request that moving it doesn’t affect the position of the Frame around text: Instead, that the shaft of the leader is anchored to the area centroid of the Frame, and the frame itself acts as a mask that obscures the portion of the leader inside the frame. I have to move lots of these call-outs around on my drawings and often need to shuffle them around to make everything fit. I can have well over 100 of them on some views. Maintaining the visual alignment of the Frames around the drawing view is important. Being able to snap the centre of a circle (Frame) to a construction line would be very useful. Knowing that it will stay there even if I relocate the arrowhead would be even more useful.
The behaviour when dragging the edit point next to the mask is very much what I would hope for. The leader shaft remains in line with the area centroid of the Frame, which is perfect.
Thank you for this feature. With a few small tweaks, it could save me many tens, if not hundreds, of hours of work each year
Is there a way to make the mask and text colours different? At the moment, the colour of my leader object and mask is orange, so naturally my text becomes orange too and is no longer visible. Currently, I have to copy another text over the leader to produce the desired effect, which is cumbersome.
Would it be possible to have some codes in the text field to change the colour of the text?
The option to customise the design of a section symbol, and add it to the dimension style… wow that would be truly amazing. Similar to a leader but it’s a section symbol.
Something like the below (screenshot from google) with control for if it’s simply one character such as “A” or a split level circle with text above and below. Control for the circle size / arrow size / arrow fill / circle fill. This would be a game changer. To be able to place them in pairs in line with each other on your layouts… wow.
A next next level dream would be those then autolinking with clipping planes in the model in some way but I’m probably getting way too ahead of myself!
Thank you so much for all the amazing enhancements to drafting over the last few years. I’ve been using Rhino for this since it was quite clunky and just always believe it would get better… and it’s made huge leaps each time! Very happy customer. Can’t wait to see what else is done next!
True. Masks as Rhino calls them or Backgrounds as AutoCAD calls them are not being export to DWG/DXF currently. I logged this a couple years ago now for the developers. RH-73565/DWG-Export-Not-Including-Text-Mask
I will add a link to the Forum thread and let the developers know that you are looking for this and maybe it will get a nudge forward for Rhino 9.
Support for Transparency in the text mask is current not possible in AutoCAD.
The background color in AutoCAD does not have an Alpha value:
So transparency can not be export from Rhino unless AutoCAD supports it. As of 2026 AutoCAD does not.
However, Masks with solid color can be export from Rhino and imported to AuoCAD, and that is already on the list.
Brian Gillespie will post here when the issue is fixed and in a build for testing.
Hope this helps.
Sincerely,
Mary Ann Fugier
McNeel Technical Support
