Before you begin to add text to your drawing, you should set up a text style or two. You can think of text styles as a tool to store your most common text formatting. Styles store text height and font information, so you don't have to set these options every time you enter text. Generally, you'll need only a few text styles.

Even if you started to add text without creating your own text style, you would still be using a text style. That's because every text object must have a style, so AutoCAD includes the Standard text style in every new drawing. The Standard style uses an AutoCAD font called Txt and includes numerous other settings that you'll learn about in this section. These other settings include width factor, oblique angle, and default height.

In this next exercise, you'll create a text style called Note1, which you'll use to add notes to the Unit plan you've been working on:

Figure 10.3. The Annotative option in the Text Style dialog box.

The Annotative option you turned on in step 6 is an important feature for keeping your text at the proper size for your drawing scale. You'll see how it works firsthand in the following section's exercises.

Before you get much further into AutoCAD's text features, take a moment to get familiar with the Annotate tab's Text and Annotation Scaling panels (see Figure 10.4). You'll be using a few of these panel tools in this chapter. If you need to, you can refer to this figure as you work through the exercises.

Figure 10.4. The Text panel (left) and the Annotation Scaling panel (right)

Even though your text height is 0.1″, or 0.15 cm, it appears at the appropriately enlarged size for the current scale. If the text were drawn to the size of 0.1″, it would be very small and barely visible. However, the Annotative Scale feature makes the adjustment to your text size based on the Annotation Scale setting.

You can see firsthand how the Annotation Scale setting affects your text:

Figure 10.7. The Add Scales To Object dialog

Now test your settings by changing the Annotation Scale value back to the previous setting:

In steps 2 through 5 of the first exercise in this section, you added a new annotation scale to the text. This is necessary for the text to be aware of the new annotation scale you want to use. Each time you include a new scale for your drawing, you need to add an annotation scale to the text in your drawing.

So far, you've only used a single multiline text object. However, if you have many notes distributed throughout a drawing, you'll need to add an annotation scale to all of them before they can automatically adjust themselves to the different scales you'll use with your drawing. If you have the Automatically Add Scale To Annotative Objects tool turned on in the status bar, this happens automatically. Otherwise, you'll have to add the scales to each annotative object. This is easy to do because you have the option to select as many objects as you need when adding annotation scales.

In the Style list box you'll see a list showing the current style. This list also contains other styles that may be present in the drawing. You can use the drop-down list to select a default style. In addition, there are the New, Set Current, and Delete buttons and options in the Font and Effects groups.

Effects

In the Effects group, you have the following options:

Upside Down

Prints text upside down.

Backwards

Prints text backward.

Vertical

Prints text in a vertical column.

Width Factor

Adjusts the width and spacing of the characters in the text. A value of 1 keeps the text at its normal width. Values greater than 1 expand the text, and values less than 1 compress the text.

Oblique Angle

Skews the text at an angle. When this option is set to a value greater than 0, the text appears italicized. A value of less than 0 (−12, for example) causes the text to lean to the left.

You can also set the width factor and oblique angle directly for text using the Width Factor and Oblique Angle tools in the Text Formatting toolbar. These tools are located toward the lower-right end of the toolbar.

Renaming a Text Style or Other Named Object

If you need to rename a text style or other named object in AutoCAD, you can do so using the Rename command. Enter Ren

To get some firsthand experience using the text-formatting tools in AutoCAD, try the following exercise. You'll use the Multiline Text tool again, but this time you'll get to try out some of its other features.

In this exercise, you'll see how you can adjust the size and font of text in the editor:

Make sure you press

While using the Multiline Text tool, you may have noticed the [Height/Justify/Line spacing/Rotation/Style/Width/Columns]: prompt immediately after you picked the first point of the text boundary. You can use any of these options to make on-the-fly modifications to the height, justification, line spacing, rotation style, or width of the multiline text.

For example, after clicking the first point for the text boundary, you can type R

You've just experimented with a few of the Text Formatting features of the Text Editor tab. A variety of additional formatting tools are available. Figure 10.9 shows where these tools are, and Table 10.1 describes their uses. They're fairly straightforward, and if you've used other word-processing programs, you should find them easy to use. Most are common to the majority of word processors, although a few—such as Symbol, Oblique Angle, and Width Factor—are unique to AutoCAD. Look at Table 10.1 and see if there are any tools you think you'll find useful.

Figure 10.9. Additional features of the Text Editor tab

The Text Editor tab also offers a tool called Symbol. This tool lets you add special symbols common to technical drawing and drafting. Figure 10.10 shows the symbols that are offered in the Symbol tool in the form of a drop-down list.

Figure 10.10. Symbols offered by the Symbol option. (See Symbol in Table 10.1 for information about how to use these symbols.

At the bottom of the Symbol drop-down list is an option called Other. By clicking the Other option, you open the Windows Character Map dialog box (Figure 10.11). Characters such as the trademark (™) and copyright (©) symbols are often available in the fonts offered in the Character Map. The contents of the Symbol drop-down list depend on the font currently selected.

Figure 10.11. The Character Map

The Character Map dialog box is a Windows accessory. If it doesn't appear when you choose Other from the Text Formatting Symbol tool menu, you may need to install the Character Map from your Windows installation CD.

Finally, if your application requires music, math, astronomy, Greek, or other symbols, AutoCAD offers a set of fonts with special symbols. Figure 10.17, later in the chapter, shows these fonts and the symbols they contain. You can set up text styles with these fonts or call them up directly from the Text Formatting toolbar's Font option.

Text Justification and Osnaps

You may have noticed that the object-justification list offers three center options: Top Center, Middle Center, and Bottom Center. All three of these options have the same effect on the text's appearance, but they each have a different effect on how osnaps act on the text. Figure 10.12 shows where the osnap point occurs on a text boundary depending on which justification option is selected. A multiline text object has only one insertion point on its boundary, which you can access with the Insert osnap.

The osnap point also appears as an extra grip point on the text boundary when you click the text. If you click the text you just entered, you'll see that a grip point now appears at the top center of the text boundary.

Knowing where the osnap points occur can be helpful when you want to align the text with other objects in your drawing. In most cases, you can use the grips to align your text boundary, but the Top Center and Middle Center justification options enable you to use the center and middle portions of your text to align the text with other objects.

Figure 10.12. The location of the Insert osnap point on a text boundary, based on its justifi-cation setting

Changing Justification of Multiple Text Objects

[Left/Align/Fit/Center/Middle/Right/TL/TC/TR/ML/MC/MR/BL/BC/BR] >BC<:

Enter the letters corresponding to the type of justification you want to use for the text. (See the section "Justifying Single-Line Text Objects" later in this chapter for a description of these options.) After you enter an option, the selected text changes to conform to the selected justification option.

You should also know about the indent and tab features of the text editor. You may have noticed the ruler at the top of the text editor. Figure 10.13 shows that ruler, including tab and indent markers.

The indent markers let you control the indention of the first line and the rest of the paragraph. The tab markers give you control over tab spacing. For new text, the tab markers don't appear until you add them by clicking the ruler. The following exercises will demonstrate the use of these markers more clearly.

Figure 10.13. The ruler at the top of the text editor lets you quickly set tabs and indents for text.

Start by practicing with the indent markers:

Here you see how you can control the indents of the selected text with the indent markers. You can set paragraphs of a single Mtext object differently, giving you a wide range of indent-formatting possibilities. Just select the text you want to set, and then adjust the indent markers.

Now try the tab markers. For this exercise, you'll try the text-import feature to import a tab-delimited text file:

The file you just imported was generated from the Attribute Extraction wizard in AutoCAD. You'll learn more about this feature in Chapter 13. This file contains tabs to align the columns of information. You can adjust those tabs in the Text Formatting toolbar, as you'll see in the next set of steps.

Now use the tab markers to adjust the tab spacing of the columns of text:

Here you saw how you can create a table or a schedule from an imported text file. You can also create a schedule from scratch by composing it directly in the text editor of the Multiline Text command. AutoCAD also offers the Table feature, which is specifically designed for creating tables (see Chapter 11). Still, this example offers a way to demonstrate the tab feature in the Multiline Text tool, and you may encounter a file in which a table is formatted in the way described here.

In addition to using the indent and tab markers on the ruler, you can control indents and tabs through the Paragraph dialog box. Do the following to get a firsthand look:

In this exercise, you used the Paragraph dialog box to set the paragraph indent and the first tab marker to be the same value. This causes the text portion of the list to be aligned at a distance of 2.2 drawing units from the left text boundary, leaving the list number extended farther to the left. This gives the list a more professional appearance.

The Paragraph dialog box gives you fine control over the formatting of your text. It lets you delete tabs by highlighting them in the list and clicking the Remove button. You can also add tabs at specific distances from the left margin of the text boundary by entering new tab locations in the Tab input box and clicking the Add button.

You specify distances in drawing units. If your drawing is set up to use Architectural units, for example, you can enter values in feet and inches or just inches. In the First Line and Hanging input boxes, you enter a numeric value for paragraph indents. As you've just seen, you can use the First Line and Hanging input boxes to create a numbered list by setting the Hanging input box value to be the same as the first tab stop position.

Justifying single-line text objects is slightly different than justifying multiline text. For example, if you change the justification setting to Center, the text moves so the center is placed at the text-insertion point. In other words, the insertion point stays in place while the text location adjusts to the new justification setting. Figure 10.19 shows the relationship between single-line text and the insertion point based on different justification settings.

Figure 10.19. Text inserted using the various justification options

To set the justification of text as you enter it, you must enter J

After you've issued Dtext's Justify option, you get the following prompt:

Enter an option
[Align/Fit/Center/Middle/Right/TL/TC/TR/ML/MC/MR/BL/BC/BR]:

Here are descriptions of each of these options. (I've left Fit and Align until last because they require more explanation.)

Figure 10.20. The word Refrigerator as it appears normally and with the Fit and Align options selected

Keeping Text from Mirroring

At times, you'll want to mirror a group of objects that contain some text. This operation causes the mirrored text to appear backward. You can change a setting in AutoCAD to make the text read normally even when it's mirrored:

1. At the Command prompt, enter Mirrtext

   

2. At the Enter new value for MIRRTEXT <1>: prompt, enter 0

   

Now, any mirrored text that isn't in a block will read normally. The text's position, however, will still be mirrored, as shown in the following example. Mirrtext is set to 0 by default.

Just as with multiline text, you can add a limited set of special characters to single-line text objects. For example, you can place the degree symbol (°) after a number, or you can underscore (underline) text. To accomplish this, you use double percent signs (%%)in conjunction with a special code. For example, to underscore text, you enclose that text with %% followed by the letter u, which is the underscore code. So to create this text, "This is underscored text," you enter the following at the prompt:

This is %%uunderscored%%u text.

Overscoring (putting a line above the text) operates in the same manner. To insert codes for symbols, you place the codes in the correct positions for the symbols they represent. For example, to enter 100.5°, you type 100.5%%d. Table 10.2 shows some other examples of special character codes.

Using the Character Map Dialog Box to Add Special Characters

You can add special characters to a single line of text in the same way you add special characters to multiline text. You may recall that to access special characters, you use the Character Map dialog box.

To open the Character Map dialog box, choose Start

Clicking the Dictionaries button in the Check Spelling dialog box opens the Dictionaries dialog box (Figure 10.22), where you can select a particular main dictionary for foreign languages or create or choose a custom dictionary. The names of main dictionary files have the .dct extension. The main dictionary for the U.S. version of AutoCAD is Enu.dct.

Figure 10.22. Choosing a dictionary

In the Dictionaries dialog box, you can also add or delete words from a custom dictionary. Custom dictionary files are ASCII files with names that end with the .cus extension. Because they're ASCII files, you can edit them outside of AutoCAD. Click the Current Custom Dictionary drop-down list to view a list of existing custom dictionaries.

If you prefer, you can select a main or custom dictionary by using the Dctmain system variable. Click the Help button and search for Dctmain for more on the Dctmain system variable.

You can also select a dictionary from the Files tab of the Options dialog box (Figure 10.23; choose Options from the Application menu). You can find the dictionary list under Text Editor, Dictionary, And Font File Names. Click the plus sign next to this item, and then click the plus sign next to the Main Dictionary item to display the dictionary options. From here, you can double-click the dictionary you prefer.

Figure 10.23. Choosing a dictionary via the Options dialog box