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The title just about summarizes my issue. Developers until recently had access to ruler measurements and annotations with their Dev Mode seats. Recently, these tools were stripped from them. I don’t understand why only designers can measure distances or leave annotations, so long as they are not editing files, why should Devs be unable to annotate or inspect files using the tools Figma designed for Devs to inspect files?

Good design practice in Figma often requires us to build things differently than they would be built with actual HTML/CSS. with Autolayout in mind, it’s better to determine the space between objects rather than apply padding to the top of Divs as many devs would do. However, when a dev wants to measure the total space between elements, they should be able to use rulers to make the measurement THEY need and not the one Figma decided they should have. 

Why were these tools stripped from Developers? We’re already on an Organization plan, paying quite a lot of money. They were also deployed with Dev Mode and my organization made it’s procurement decisions for Dev Mode based on the value of the tools for developers. It’s frustrating that we keep hitting paywalls or having features removed. 

Hi ​@Josh_Everingham, thanks for reaching out and sharing your feedback!

I’ve passed this onto our Dev Mode team, and to clarify, nothing has recently changed when it comes to Rulers and Annotations. Dev seats have never included annotation tools or measurement capabilities. If you or others on your team have experienced any recent changes, it is likely due to recent changes in file access and/or seats within your account.

 

Full Seats (with edit access):

  • can see and use the ruler and annotations tools
Full Seat Toolbar View

 

Dev Seats (view-only access):

  • can see annotations and measurements on the canvas
  • BUT do not have the ability to create them, so they won't see the tools
Dev Seat Toolbar View


 

I agree with Josh’s position on the need for developer seats to have a measuring tool… we might not need to leave the measurement annotated but it’s always useful to measure offsets, relative positioning or many other aspects that the designer might’ve not considered when annotating the design or that the Alt key will not measure because it can’t auto detect what we want to measure.

 

An alternate version of the measuring tool that is “read only”, I mean that it will show the measurement in the screen but be erased when the file is closed or even when MouseUp event triggers, only so that we can get the information and then transfer it into our code.  That would be great.

What’s the reasoning for this though? I kind of understand the logic of annotations being used by designers to explain how a component behaves, but a lot of designers do this via comments, which is more of a process issue than a Figma issue, but it just seems like a weird thing to lock behind edit access.

Maybe it would be useful for Editors to have the ability to enable dev seats to annotate. That way if they aren’t, or don’t want to annotate, the dev can.

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