Railings

A railing follows a path. Draw the path yourself for a balcony or a terrace, or let Archeform derive it from a stair.

Railing is on the toolbar. The stair version works on a stair you already have, so it lives in that stair’s right-click menu.

Free-standing

1. Click Railing.
2. Click each point of the path.
3. Double-click to finish, or click the first point to close a loop.

Type a number + Enter	length of the segment
Shift	lock to an axis
↑ / ↓	justification — centre, left, right
← / →	cycle the infill

Justification shifts the axis by half a post, which is what lets you draw along the edge of a slab and have the railing sit on it rather than half over the drop.

Caution

The height comes from the active storey plus a base offset, not from whatever the cursor snapped to. Inference gives the plan position only.

Without that rule a click that caught a window sill would put the railing a metre up in the air, and you would not see it until the section.

On a stair

1. Right-click the stair → Archeform → Stair Tools → Railing on Stair.
2. Hover a stair — it highlights, with a preview of the railing on one side.
3. Move the cursor to the other side and the preview follows.
4. Click to build. ↑ / ↓ builds both sides at once.

The path runs along the nosings, so posts stand on the step edges rather than floating between them. Landings connect at their own level, and U-turns go round the well.

Railing hosted on a stair

Caution

The path is baked at the moment you build it. host_uuid records where it came from, but changing the stair afterwards does not move the railing — delete it and pull a new one.

A live link was considered and rejected: it would mean every stair edit silently rebuilding railings, which is exactly the kind of surprise that costs an evening.

Infill

Balusters	vertical bars at a spacing
Glass panel	a sheet per bay, glazed or solid
Horizontal bars	rails between posts
None	handrail and posts only

Parameters

Field	Default	What it does
Height	1 000 mm	to the top of the handrail
Side offset	0	shifts the axis sideways
Base offset	0	height of the foot above the storey — defaults only
Handrail	profile	section and size from the catalogue
Post	profile	section and size, plus spacing
Infill	balusters	with its own settings

Handrail and post sections come from the same profile catalogue as beams and columns.

Warnings

Two soft checks, following ČSN 74 3305:

• height below 1 000 mm
• clear gap between vertical members above 120 mm

Both warn rather than refuse.

Editing

Right-click → Railing Properties; several selected railings edit together.

Rail Stretch puts grips on every vertex of the path. Dragging moves the point in plan only — the height stays put, because on a stair a vertical nudge would break the relationship to the steps.

Grips are drawn and picked at handrail height, where the railing actually is.

In IFC and in drawings

Exports as IfcRailing with Pset_RailingCommon. The only quantity IFC4 defines for a railing is Length, so that is the only one written — it is the true 3D length of the handrail, sloping on a stair, not the plan projection.

In plan a railing is two thin lines closed at free ends. Balusters and posts are deliberately not drawn: at 1:50 they would be a smear. In vertical sections the railing is filled.

See also

• Stairs
• Beams — the same profile catalogue