Unless I am missing something a manually drawn track must first be saved to a file before it can be "selected" with the "pan map" tool to compute area.
How about adding "compute area" to the Draw Track menu (right click options) so that it can be accessd on the fly?
Hmmm ... for that matter now that elevation data is cached how about a similar "on the fly" profile capability?
That could even include high resolution profile data along a track and not just limited to the defined track points.
Even single track segment could show a nice detailed cross section of terrain.
Previously, in order to avoid blocky profiles (typically from manually drawn tracks) without having to do tedious (i.e. lots of track points) track drawing I have used the add points (spline) function to add points to an existing track, then added local DEM or Downloaded elevation data to the track so that even each new point has a complete set of data. So in essence it seems that all the functionality (at least one way of doing it) is already there and might be easily combined into a one click operation.
KF