Archicad 19 brings substantial changes to the label tool. Labels are a key component of automatic annotation, so improvements are always welcome.
The biggest change is multiple labels on a single element in a given viewpoint. Since you can place more than one label, the Label Elements checkbox is illogical and has been removed. Therefore, the per-element-type pre-setup of the label tool has also been removed. To label an element, set up the tool like you would any other, and click on the element.
Labels can be associated or independent. For labels this is considered part of the geometry method, though the G shortcut doesn't work. This isn't new, but let's review.
Independent labels are often text, but they don't have to be. Many of the labels in the label chooser are meant to be associated and will display nothing, or nothing useful, or a warning about being unavailable for independent labels.
Associated labels move when the element is moved, and can display information about the element. There are new labels in the Archicad library designed to display many kinds of element properties. Take a look at General Label 19 to see some of the possibilities. Associated labels can also be text.
Expect more kinds of labels. Expect to place more labels. Expect more label favorites.
There's an inverted pointer option for ceilings in section.
They added a 'Simple' and 'Detailed' option to the geometry method. Simple places the label with one click, with the default pointer shape. Detailed lets you draw the pointer with three clicks. Detailed will be the right choice for us in almost every case; they could have left this feature out.
There is a new button to turn the pointer off and on. It's a big improvement on the old, very counter-intuitive, 'Use symbol arrow' checkbox. You can turn off the pointer for any label, including text. So you can have a bare text element that's actually a label.
There is a pre-selection highlight on label-able elements with the label tool active. (The level dimension tool has the same thing.) Cmd+tab works as you would expect to cycle through a stack of elements.
A lot of the new labels in the Archicad library are proof-of-concept. You can easily call out the composite of a wall, but is that composite name suitable for output annotation? Informing the user and informing the builder are not the same thing. It will take time to work through these issues. I would like to automatically label more things. In the future, everything will be automatically labeled, but this is not the future.
This is a big update to labels, but there are still frustrating limitations that we will be stuck with until the next big update.
The settings dialog has a graphical chooser that's more like the object tool, but it still doesn't show you the folders. A digression:
When a library part is superseded by a new version, I move the old one to an "xOld" folder outside the normal category folders. The xOld folder is in the loaded libraries. This means placed instances of the old object continue to work, but when you look in the category folder, you see the new one. If you're using an object and you notice it's in the xOld folder, that tells you there's a new version. But some tools (the markers, all of them) don't show you the folders, so all the parts are piled into one dumb list. So I can't sort-of hide old labels and markers from the user.
The only material improvement in the new label chooser is the appearance of preview image icons, which, I guess is sort of nice? But they should have just had it match the typical library parts. And because labels are a bigger deal now, there will be more of them, in a longer and longer dumb list.
Another disappointment is the lack of an option to align the pointer with the vertical center of the top or bottom line of text in a multi-line label. And you still can't work around this with GDL, because the scripted symbol is automatically shifted according to the pointer alignment. This is graphically bad, but I am very near throwing in the towel and aligning all labels to the middle. If they didn't fix it in this update, they're never going to fix it. Sometimes you have to smooth the workflow at the expense of graphic standards. Which is a whole topic on its own.
They fixed the, let's call it, mirrored placement bug. But actual mirroring is still wrong. At least now the ghost bounding box shows you what's actually going to happen, even though it's not what you want. (Only the angled part of the pointer is mirrored.)
They made it impossible to accurately place a pointerless associated label on the first try. Example: Door or window tag in section/elevation. But that is probably a bug.
If there is another big update to labels, the next thing to wish for is placing a detail marker as an associated label.