Chapter 13: Text with Character 273

Using the Same Old Line

Despite its limitations, the TEXT command is useful for labels and other short notes for which MTEXT would be overkill. The following procedure shows you how to add text to your drawing by using AutoCAD’s TEXT command.

You can use TEXT for multiple lines of text: Just keep pressing Enter after you type each line of text, and TEXT puts the new line below the previous one. The problem with this approach is that TEXT creates each line of text as a separate object. If you want to add or remove words in those multiple lines later on, AutoCAD can’t do any word-wrapping for you; you have to edit each line separately, cutting words from one line and adding them to the adjacent line.

The TEXT command doesn’t use a dialog box, a fancy formatting toolbar, or a contextual Ribbon tab like the MTEXT command’s In-Place Text Editor. You set options by typing them into the command line or the Dynamic Input tooltip.

Here’s how you add text with the TEXT command:

1.Set an appropriate text style current, as described in the section “Simply stylish text,” earlier in this chapter.

It’s possible to set an already created text style current at the TEXT command prompt, but it’s usually more straightforward to set the style before starting the command.

An alternative to opening the Text Style dialog box to make an existing style current is to click the Text Style drop-down list and choose the style there. Look for the Text Style drop-down list on the Annotation panel’s slideout (Home tab) or the Text panel of the Annotate tab.

2.(Optional) Use the Object Snap button on the status bar to enable or disable running object snaps.

You may or may not want to snap text to existing objects. For example, you’d want to use a Center object snap to locate a letter or number precisely at the center of a circle. Make sure that you specify middle-center (MC) justification for the text to ensure that this works perfectly.

3.On the Home tab’s Annotation panel, click the lower part of the big button labeled Text, and then choose Single Line from the drop-down menu to start the TEXT command.

Don’t click the upper part of the Text button — that starts the multiline text command, MTEXT, which we cover in the next section.

If your text style is annotative and this is the first annotative object you’re creating in this drawing session, AutoCAD usually displays a Select Annotation Scale dialog box, which advises you that you are

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274 Part III: If Drawings Could Talk

indeed creating an annotative object and asks you to set the scale at which you want the annotation to appear; click OK to continue. Later, we explain how and why to turn this annoying dialog box off.

AutoCAD tells you the current text style and height settings and prompts you to select a starting point for the text or to choose an option for changing the text justification or current text style first:

Current text style: “Standard” Text height: 0.2000 Annotative: No

Specify start point of text or [Justify/Style]:

If the text style is annotative, the text height displayed in the prompt is the model space height, not the ultimate plotted text height. For example, if the text style is created with a fixed paper text height of 0.2000, and the annotation scale is set to 1:2, the AutoCAD prompt will read

Text height: 0.4000.

4.If you want a different justification from the default (Left), type J, press Enter, and choose one of the other justification options.

Look up create single-line text in the online help system if you need help with the justification options.

5.Specify the insertion point for the first text character.

You can enter the point’s coordinates from the keyboard, use the mouse to click a point onscreen, or press Enter to locate new text immediately below the most recent single-line text object that you created.

AutoCAD prompts you for the text height (or the paper height if the text style is annotative):

Specify height <0.2000>:

6.Specify the height for the text.

This prompt doesn’t appear if you’re using a text style with a fixed (that is, nonzero) height. See the “Simply stylish text” section, earlier in this chapter, for information about fixed versus variable text heights.

AutoCAD prompts you for the text rotation angle:

Specify rotation angle of text <0>:

7.Specify the text rotation angle by typing the rotation angle and pressing Enter or by rotating the line onscreen with the mouse.

AutoCAD prompts you to type the text.

8.Type the first line of text and press Enter.

9.Type additional lines of text, pressing Enter at the end of each line.

Figure 13-2 shows text appearing onscreen as you type it (or it would if this book had animated pages).

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Chapter 13: Text with Character 275

Figure 13-2: Single-line text appears letter by letter.

10.To stop entering text and return to the command prompt, press Enter at the start of a blank line.

AutoCAD adds the new single-line text object — or objects, if you typed more than one line — to the drawing.

To align lines of text exactly, make sure that you type all the lines in one instance of the TEXT command, pressing Enter after each line to make the next line appear just after it. Otherwise, aligning different lines of text precisely is harder to do (unless you set your snap just right or use a complicated combination of object snaps and point filters). To edit single-line text after you’ve created it, select the text, right-click, and choose Edit (or double-click the text) to open the In-Place Text Editor. (In-place simply means that you edit text at its exact size and location in the drawing.) We tell you more about inplace text editing in the section “Making it with Mtext,” later in this chapter.

An in-place editing box highlights the selected text object, enabling you to edit the contents of the text string. If you want to edit other text properties such as text height, select the text, right-click, and choose Properties to display the Properties palette. Use the Properties palette to change parameters as needed.

If the Quick Properties button on your application status bar is enabled, clicking a single-line text object opens the Quick Properties panel, allowing you to change some (but not all) of the same properties as the Properties palette.

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276 Part III: If Drawings Could Talk

Turning On Your Annotative Objects

Annotative objects were introduced in AutoCAD 2008, ending 25 years of calculating agony, but a quick show of hands at Autodesk University and AUGI CAD Camp classes reveals that on average only about 20 percent have ever tried them — and most of them gave up and went back to the old way because they thought they weren’t working. There’s a very simple explanation for this, which we come to in a moment.

Here’s a quick example that shows how things are supposed to work. Make sure that you are in model space.

1.Set the annotation controls.

In the lower-right corner of the AutoCAD screen, you’ll find three buttons with variants of a triangular symbol. They represent the end view of an engineer’s triangular scale; an old-timer in your office should be able to show you one and how they worked. Click the center and righthand buttons, the ones without the numbers beside them, until they are grayed out and don’t show a small yellow splash in them. If the left-hand button doesn’t display the numbers 1:1, click it and select 1:1 from the drop-down list.

2.Select an annotative text style.

Use the STYLE command as described previously in the “Get in style” section and set the Annotative style to be current. Set its Paper Text Height to 0.125.

3.Create some text.

Use the TEXT command and create a line of text that says Scale 1:1.

The first time you place annotative text, you’re asked to select a drawing scale, and it defaults to the current scale, which is probably what you want anyway. Eventually this becomes a nuisance, so the check box lets you turn it off.

4.Change the drawing scale.

Click the left-hand annotative control button and select 1:2 from the drop-down list. This sets the current drawing scale to 1:2. Hey, the first piece of text disappears! Not to worry; that’s what it’s supposed to do.

5.Create some text.

Use the TEXT command again and create a line of text that says Scale 1:2, and another one that says Both scales. Note that they are twice as tall as the now-invisible Scale 1:1 text.

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6.Change the drawing scale.

Click the left-hand annotative control button and select 1:1 from the drop-down list. Interesting! The first piece of text reappears, but the other two disappear!

7.Add another scale to an object.

Click the left-hand annotative control button and select 1:2 from the drop-down list. Now click the Both scales text and then right-click. Select Annotative Object Scale, and then select Add/Delete Scales. When the dialog box appears, click the Add button in the upper-right corner and then select 1:1 from the list. Click OK, and then OK again, to return to the drawing screen.

8.Change the drawing scale.

Click the left-hand annotative control button and select 1:1 from the drop-down list. Interesting! The Scale 1:1 text reappears, Scale 1:2 disappears, and Both scales changes size to match the height of Scale 1:1 text!

9.Change the drawing scale again.

Click the left-hand annotative control button and select 1:5 from the drop-down list. All three text items disappear!

As indicated earlier, that’s how annotative objects, including text, dimensions (discussed Chapter 14), hatch patterns (Chapter 15), and blocks (Chapter 17) are supposed to work. Upon creation, they automatically size themselves

to suit the current drawing scale, they’re visible only when their annotation scales match the current drawing scale, and they can have more than one scale attached, so they’re visible in more than one drawing scale setting.

Better yet, they exhibit this same behavior in paper space viewports. It thus becomes trivially easy to set up drawings with details at other scales. We cover this in more detail in Chapter 14.

If an annotative object has multiple scales attached and you edit its location at one scale, this doesn’t affect its location at the other scales.

But wait! There’s more! When viewing an object with multiple scales, you aren’t looking at a copy of the object but instead you see a different configuration of the same object. To see this, edit the contents of your Both scales text object to say something else. The new contents automatically appear at all scale representations of that object.

Now we reveal the dirty, dark secret as to why most people gave up on them. It all gets back to Step 1 in the preceding instructions. By default, the middleand right-hand buttons are both turned on, but we had you turn them off. Turn the middle button back on and observe that now all annotative objects at all scales

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278 Part III: If Drawings Could Talk

are always visible, no matter what the value of the current drawing scale, even if none of the objects has a scale that matches the current drawing scale.

But wait! It gets worse! If you turn on the right-hand button and then change the drawing scale, every annotation object retroactively gets the current scale added to it.

It’s easy to see how the last two statements would easily confuse people into not understanding how annotative objects work. We can think of only one situation where you would want all objects to retroactively receive the new drawing scale, and that would be where you have created a drawing with the intention of printing it at a specific scale, and then you decide that you need to change the scale to suit a different printer or paper size.

Most of the time, for most people, there are way too many scales listed in the Add Scales to Object dialog box. AutoCAD has a handy-dandy Edit Drawing Scales dialog box that lets you remove those imperial scales from your current drawing if you never work in feet and inches. (And vice versa, for the metrically challenged.) To run through your scales, choose Scale List on the Annotation Scaling panel of the Ribbon’s Annotate tab. If you make a mistake, the Reset button will restore all the default scales. You can remove those extra scales for all your drawing in the Default Scale List dialog box, accessible on the User Preferences tab of the Options dialog box.

You can display the drawing status bar (shown in Figures 13-2 and 13-3) by clicking the down arrow near the right end of the application status bar to open the application status bar menu, and then choosing Drawing Status Bar.

Figure 13-3 shows two versions of the same drawing, with the same text objects (the bulleted notes and windows sizes) and wall hatching displaying at the different annotation scales specified in the two status bars. The non-annotative text (the room label) remains unchanged. (we cover hatching your drawings in Chapter 15.)

Figure 13-3: Annotative objects resize automatically as the annotation scale changes.

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