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Take Me to Your Leader

Don’t worry; we’re not space aliens, popular opinion to the contrary. No, we’re talking about those notes with arrows that point to drawing objects that you need to embellish with some verbiage.

Multileaders — mleaders for short — are a vast improvement over old-style leaders available prior to AutoCAD 2008. In fact, they’re so good, they should be running the United Nations! Mleaders, unlike the old-style leaders, are single objects. They are also able to point in multiple directions at once (just don’t ask them which way is the bus station). Finally, multileaders — just like text, dimensions, hatching, and other objects you use to document your drawing — can be annotative.

There are two older-style leaders stored in AutoCAD’s attic (Autodesk hates to throw anything away, because sure as blazes someone will complain that they still need it for a custom menu macro they created twenty years ago and use all the time). These semiretired leaders are no longer accessible on menus or toolbars, but they’re still lurking up there waiting to . . . er, lead you astray. If you’ve become attached to typing commands, you may be inclined to type either LEADER or LE to create those pointy-headed thingies. If you do, be aware that LEADER runs the positively ancient command for creating notes-with-arrows. There are no options, so only straight leader lines and infinitely long text strings are what you get. LE (the alias for the QLEADER command) runs the merely elderly command for creating notes-with-arrows; this one has a Settings dialog box where you can set some options, and it does ask you to specify a width for your Mtext note. However, unlike multileaders, both LEADER and LE create the leader lines and the text as two separate objects. The main reason for mentioning them here is that you’ll probably run into them in older drawings.

Electing a leader

You can draw multileader objects that consist of leader lines and multiline text at the same time by using the MLEADER command, as described in the following steps:

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294 Part III: If Drawings Could Talk

1.Set a multileader style — one that’s appropriate for your needs — current.

Choose an existing style from the Multileader Style drop-down list on the Home tab’s Annotation panel slideout, or create a new style by clicking the Multileader Style button on the Annotation slideout. Visit the online help for tips on creating new multileader styles.

2.Choose Multileader from the Annotation panel.

The command line prompts you to select the location for the pointy end of the leader arrowhead:

Specify leader arrowhead location or [leader Landing first/Content first/Options] <Options>:

The initial default method is to locate the arrowhead followed by the leader landing (that is, the short horizontal line between the leader line and the text), at which point AutoCAD displays the In-Place Text Editor, and you enter the text of your note. If you’d rather place the leader landing first, type L and press Enter. If you’d rather type the content first, type C and press Enter.

If you want to draw spline-curved rather than straight leader lines, specify the number of pick points for the leader lines and press Enter to display multileader options at the command line or the Dynamic Input tooltip. Refer to the online help for more information on the command options.

3.Pick a location in the drawing that you want the leader to point to.

If you use an object snap mode, such as Nearest or Midpoint, to pick a point on an object, AutoCAD associates the leader with the object. If you later move the object, AutoCAD updates the leader so that it points to the new location.

The command line prompts you for the next point.

4.Pick a second point.

AutoCAD draws a shaft from the arrowhead to this point.

If you pick a second point that’s too close to the arrowhead point and AutoCAD doesn’t have enough room to draw the arrowhead, it omits the arrowhead.

By default, AutoCAD lets you pick two points for the leader line: The first point locates the arrowhead, and the second point locates the start of the short horizontal leader landing. If you need more points than that, restart the command and choose Options, Maxpoints and set a new value.

After you pick the point for the leader landing, AutoCAD opens the In-Place Text Editor.

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Chapter 13: Text with Character 295

5.Type your text.

You’re now in the same In-Place Text Editor we describe earlier in this chapter, with the same Text Editor tab and options.

6.Click Close.

The In-Place Text Editor window closes and adds your text to the drawing, next to the leader.

Figure 13-10 shows several different leaders with notes.

Figure 13-10: No loss for (multi)leaders.

You can use grips to manipulate a multileader’s individual components, just as if it were several objects instead of a single object. Hold down the Ctrl key and click a multileader to select different pieces. You can even use grips to adjust the width of multileader text as if it were a plain everyday Mtext object.

Multi options for multileaders

In addition to the MLEADER command itself, which we walk you through in the preceding steps, multileaders come with a slew of formatting, drawing, and editing commands:

MLEADEREDIT: Use this command to add or remove leader lines from multileader objects. You’ll find each of those functions on the Multileader drop-down list (refer to Figure 13-10).

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296 Part III: If Drawings Could Talk

MLEADERSTYLE: Multileaders, like text, tables, and dimensions, are formatted according to named styles. To display the Multileader Style Manager dialog box (which looks a lot like a simplified version of the Dimension Style Manager) click Multileader Style on the Home tab’s Annotation slideout.

MLEADERALIGN: A tedious chore in earlier AutoCAD versions was getting all the leaders to line up; it usually involved drawing a construction line and then using object snaps to move common points on the leaders to the construction line. To line up multileaders, choose Align from the Multileader drop-down list.

MLEADERCOLLECT: Multileaders can contain blocks as well as text (we cover blocks in Chapter 17). Choose Collect from the Multileader dropdown list to gather a group of leaders containing blocks; they’ll rearrange themselves as a single multileader containing the multiple blocks.

For more information on any of these commands, look them up by name in the Command Reference section of the online help.

Multileaders and multileader styles can be annotative or non-annotative. Making them annotative and assigning appropriate annotation scales is a huge timesaver for creating them initially and for creating detail views at different scales.

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14

Entering New Dimensions

In This Chapter

Placing dimensions in drawings

Choosing a dimensioning method

Creating and modifying your own dimension styles

Adjusting dimension sizes to suit the drawing plot scale

Placing and modifying annotative dimensions, including details at other scales

Modifying dimensions

In drafting — either CAD or manual drafting — dimensions are special text labels with attached lines that together clearly indicate the size of

something. Although it’s theoretically possible to draw all the pieces of each dimension by using AutoCAD commands, such as LINE and MTEXT, dimensioning is so common of a drafting task that AutoCAD

provides special commands for doing the job more efficiently. These dimensioning commands group the parts of each dimension into a convenient, easy-to-edit package much like a block. In fact, AutoCAD actually produces each dimension as something it calls an anonymous block. We discuss blocks in Chapter 17.

Even better, as you edit an object — by stretching a line, for example — AutoCAD automatically updates the measurement displayed in the dimension text label to indicate the object’s new size, as shown in Figure 14-1. And perhaps best of all, AutoCAD’s annotative dimensions adjust their text height and arrowhead size automatically to suit the annotation scale on

the model tab or the viewport scale in a layout. We explain the general principles of annotative objects in Chapters 13 and

15; in this chapter, we take a close look at annotative dimensions.

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