One of the most tedious drafting tasks is applying notes to your drawing. The AutoCAD^® 2015 software makes this job faster by enabling you to type your notes, insert text from other sources, and copy notes that repeat throughout a drawing, and it helps you create professional-looking notes using a variety of fonts, type sizes, and type styles.

In this chapter, you’ll add notes to your apartment building plan. In the process, you’ll explore some of the AutoCAD text-creation and text-editing features. You’ll learn how to control the size, slant, type style, and orientation of text and how to import text files. You’ll start by working through some exercises that show you the process of preparing a drawing for text. You’ll then add a few lines of text to the drawing and learn how text size and drawing scale interrelate. The rest of the chapter shows you the tools available for formatting text to fit your application.

In this chapter, you will learn to

• Prepare a drawing for text
• Set the annotation scale and add text
• Explore text formatting in AutoCAD
• Add simple single-line text objects
• Use the Check Spelling feature
• Find and replace text

Preparing a Drawing for Text

In these first sections, you’ll go through the process of adding text to a drawing that currently has none. By doing so, you’ll gain firsthand experience in using all the tools you’ll need for adding text to a drawing. Start by setting up a drawing to prepare it for the addition of text:

1. Start AutoCAD, and open the Unit file. If you haven’t created this file, you can use the file called 9a-unit.dwg (metric users should use 9a-unit-metric.dwg), which you’ll find among this chapter’s files at the book’s web page, www.sybex.com/go/masteringautocad2015. After the file is open, choose Save As from the Application menu to save the Unit drawing to a file called Unit.dwg.
2. Create a layer called Notes, and make it the current layer. Notes is the layer on which you’ll keep all your text information.
3. If the FLR-PAT layer is on, turn it off. Otherwise, the floor pattern you added previously will obscure the text you enter during the exercises in this chapter.
4. Set up your view so it looks similar to the top image in Figure 9-1.

   

Organizing Text by Styles

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 on which you’ve been working:

1. 
   Click the Text Style drop-down list from the Home tab’s expanded Annotation panel and select Manage Text Styles, or type St↵. This opens the Text Style dialog box (see Figure 9-2).

   

2. Click the New button to the right in the dialog box to open the New Text Style dialog box.
3. Enter Note1 for the name of your new style, and then click OK.
4. In the Text Style dialog box again, click the Font Name drop-down list in the Font group and select a font for your style.
5. Locate the Courier New TrueType font and select it. A quick way to locate the font is to click in the list and start typing the font name.
6. Select the Annotative option in the Size group (see Figure 9-3).

   

7. In the Paper Text Height box, enter 0.1. You’ll see your input change to ¹/₈″ if you are using the architectural unit style. Metric users should enter 0.15.
8. Close the 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 in the exercises later in the section “Setting the Annotation Scale and Adding Text.”

Getting Familiar with the Text and Annotation Scale Control Panels

Before you get much further into the AutoCAD text features, take a moment to familiarize yourself with the Annotate tab’s Text and Annotation Scaling panels (see Figure 9-4). 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.

If your Annotation panel doesn’t look like the one in this figure, hover over it and the panel will expand to display the options.

Setting the Annotation Scale and Adding Text

You’ve got a text style set up and ready to use. Now you’ll add some text to your unit plan. Before you begin, you should determine a drawing scale. This is important because with the Annotative feature turned on, AutoCAD needs to know the drawing scale in order to set the size of the text. Follow these steps:

1. In the right side of the status bar, click the drop-down arrow next to Annotation Scale.

   

2. Select ¼″ = 1′-0″. Metric users, select 1:100.

You’ve just set the drawing scale for the Model Space view. This isn’t a permanent setting; you can change it at any time, as you’ll see later. The settings you used for the annotation scale are somewhat arbitrary for the purposes of demonstrating the Annotative Scale feature.

Inserting Text

Finally, you can begin to add text. To start, you’ll add some text to label the entrance to the floor plan. The process is similar to the process in other graphics programs that offer a text feature. You draw a boundary in the area where you want the text to appear, and then you start typing:

1. 
   Turn off the Object Snap tool in the status bar.
2. 
   Click the Multiline Text tool in the Annotate tab’s Text panel. You can also type MT↵. You see a prompt that tells you the current text style and height:

   Current text style: "Note1" Text height: 4 13/16"
   Annotative: Yes
   Specify first corner:

3. Click the first point indicated in the top image in Figure 9-1 to start the text boundary window. This boundary window indicates the area in which you’ll place the text. Notice the arrow near the bottom of the window; it indicates the direction of the text flow. You don’t have to be too precise about where you select the points for the boundary because you can adjust the location and size later.
4. At the Specify opposite corner or [Height/Justify/Line spacing/Rotation/Style/Width/Columns]: prompt, click the second point indicated in the top image in Figure 9-1. The Text Editor tab appears with the text editor superimposed over the area you just selected (see Figure 9-5).
5. Click the text editor and type Entry. As you type, the word appears in the text editor just as it will appear in your drawing.
6. Press ↵ to advance one line; then enter 6′ by 7′.
7. Press ↵ to advance another line, and enter [182 cm by 213 cm].
8. Press ↵ again to advance another line, and enter carpet floor.
9. 
   Click Close Text Editor on the Close panel. The text appears in the drawing just as it did in the text editor. (See the bottom image in Figure 9-1.)

After you’ve added text, if the text doesn’t quite fit in the area you’ve indicated, you can make adjustments to the text boundary. Click the text to expose the text boundary, including the boundary grips. Then click and drag the grips to resize the boundary. The word-wrap feature automatically adjusts the text formatting to fit the text boundary.

You may have noticed that the Text Editor tab and text editor work like any text editor; if you make a typing error, you can highlight the error and retype the letter or word. You can perform other word processing functions too, such as using search and replace, importing text, and changing fonts.

You also saw that the text editor shows how your text will appear in the location you selected using the text boundary. If your view of the drawing is such that the text is too small to be legible, the text editor enlarges the text so that you can read it clearly. Likewise, if you’re zoomed in too closely to see the entire text, the text editor adjusts the text to enable you to see all of it.

Exploring Text and Scale

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 how the Annotation Scale setting affects your text:

1. 
   First, make sure the Show Annotation Objects tool is turned on in the status bar, or type Annoallvisible↵1↵.
2. 
   Click the Annotation Scale setting, and select 1/2″ = 1″-0″. Metric users should select 1:50. The new text changes to the appropriate size for the selected scale.

   

3. 
   Click the Add/Delete Scales tool in the Annotate tab’s Annotation Scaling panel, or enter Objectscale↵.
4. At the Select annotative objects: prompt, select the text and press ↵. You see the Annotation Object Scale dialog box (see Figure 9-6) listing the annotation scales you have used for this drawing.

   

5. You can add additional scales to your text object. Click the Add button, which opens the Add Scales To Object dialog box (see Figure 9-7).
6. Select 1/2″ = 1′-0″ from the list (metric users should select 1:50) and click OK, and then click OK again in the Annotation Object Scale dialog box.

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

1. In the status bar, click the Annotation Scale setting, and select 1/4″= 1′-0″. Metric users should select 1:100.

   

2. The text changes back to its original size.

In steps 2 through 4 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.

If you prefer, you can turn on the Automatically Add Scales To Annotative Objects tool in the status bar, which does just what its name says. The keyboard command for this tool is Annoautoscale↵4↵. Once a scale is added, you can quickly change between scales by selecting a scale from the Annotation Scale list.

So far, you’ve used only 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 Scales 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.

Understanding the Text Style Dialog Box Options

You’ve just taken nearly all the steps you’ll need to know to add text to any drawing. Now let’s take a step back and look more closely at some of the finer points of adding text, starting with text styles. The following sections give you more detailed information about the text style settings you saw in the early part of this chapter. They explain those settings and their purposes. Some of them, such as Width Factor, can be quite useful. Others, such as the Backwards and Vertical options, are rarely used. Take a moment to study these settings to become familiar with what is available and make a mental note of these items for future reference.

Styles

In the Styles list box, you’ll see a list showing the current style. This list also contains other styles that may be present in the drawing. The drop-down list below the Styles list box lets you control whether all styles are listed or just those that are being used in the drawing. In addition, there are the Set Current, New, and Delete buttons and options in the Font and Effects groups. You have already seen the Size group.

Set Current/New/Delete

Set Current makes the selected style the current one. New lets you create a new text style. Delete lets you delete the selected style.

The Delete option isn’t available for the Standard style.

Font

In the Font group, you have the following options:

1. Font Name Lets you select a font from a list of available fonts. The list is derived from the font resources available to Windows 8, Windows 7, Windows Vista, or Windows XP plus the standard AutoCAD fonts.
2. Font Style Offers variations of a font, such as italic or bold, when they’re available.
3. Use Big Font Applicable to Asian fonts. This option is offered only with AutoCAD fonts.

Size

The Size group offers settings relating to text size, scale, and orientation.

1. Annotative Causes the text size to adjust automatically to the current annotation scale setting.
2. Match Text Orientation To Layout Causes the text orientation to match the orientation of a layout view. This option is available only when the Annotative option is on.
3. Height/Paper Text Height Lets you enter a font size. With the Annotative option turned off, this option is named Height and will set the absolute height of the text. With the Annotative option turned on, it shows Paper Text Height and will set the height of the text when printed. A 0 height has special meaning when you use the Text command to enter single-line text as described later in this chapter.

Effects

In the Effects group, you have the following options:

1. Upside Down Displays text upside down.
2. Backwards Displays text backward.
3. Vertical Displays text in a vertical column.
4. 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.

   

5. 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 expanded Formatting panel under the Text Editor Ribbon panel. This tab is available when you create new text or double-click existing text.

Exploring Text Formatting in AutoCAD

You’ve seen how you can set up a style and make scale adjustments. AutoCAD also offers a wide range of text-formatting options that are typical of the options in most word processing programs. You can control fonts, text height, justification, line spacing, and width. You can even include special characters such as degree symbols or stacked fractions. With these additional formatting tools, you can make adjustments to the text style with which you started.

Adjusting the Text Height and Font

To get some 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 use the Ribbon tools to adjust the size and font of text:

1. Pan your view so the kitchen is just at the top of the drawing, as shown in the first image in Figure 9-8.

   

2. In the status bar, make sure Annotation Scale is set to 1/4″ = 1′-0″ (1:100 for metric users).
3. 
   Click the Multiline Text tool on the Annotate tab’s Text panel, and then select a text boundary window, as shown in the first image in Figure 9-8.
4. In the text editor, type the following:

   Living Room
   14′-0″ by 16′-5″ [427 cm by 500 cm]

   Be sure you press ↵ after Living Room, but make the rest of the text a continuous string. As you type, the words wrap. AutoCAD uses word wrap to fit the text inside the text boundary area.

5. Highlight the text 14′-0″ by 16′-5″ [427 cm by 500 cm] as you would in any word processor. For example, you can click the end of the line to place the cursor there and then Shift+click the beginning of the line to highlight the whole line.
6. In the Text Editor tab’s Style panel, click in the Text Height text box and enter 1/16↵. Metric users, enter 0.08↵. The highlighted text changes to a smaller size.
7. Highlight the words Living Room.
8. In the Formatting panel, click the Font drop-down list to display a list of font options.

   

9. Scroll up the list until you find Arial. The text in the text editor changes to reflect the new font.
10. 
    With the words Living Room still highlighted, click the Underline button in the Formatting panel.
11. 
    Click Close Text Editor in the Close panel. The label appears in the area you indicated in step 3 (see the bottom image in Figure 9-8).
12. To see how you can go back to the Text Editor tab, double-click the text. The Text Editor tab and text editor appear, enabling you to change the text.
13. Click Close Text Editor in the Close panel.

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↵ and then specify a rotation angle for the text window, either graphically with a rubber-banding line or by entering an angle value. After you’ve entered a rotation angle, you can resume selecting the text boundary.

Understanding the Text Editor Tab

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 9-9 shows where these tools are, and Table 9-1 describes their uses. Note that Figure 9-9 shows the Ribbon with the AutoCAD window at a 1024-pixel width. The Style panel will display the text styles as a list in large displays. These Ribbon tools are 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 9-1 and see if there are any tools you think you’ll find useful.

Adding Symbols and Special Characters

The Text Editor tab also offers a tool called Symbol. This tool lets you add special symbols common to technical drawing and drafting. Figure 9-10 shows the symbols that are offered in the Symbol tool in the form of a drop-down list.

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 (see Figure 9-11). Characters such as the trademark (™) and copyright (©) symbols are often available in the fonts offered in the Character Map. The contents of the Character Map depend on the font currently selected.

The Character Map is a Windows accessory. If it doesn’t appear when you choose Other from the 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 9-17, later in this 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 Formatting panel’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 9-12 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 were to center-justify the text you just entered, you would see that a grip point 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.

Changing Justification of Multiple Text Objects

You’ve seen how you can change the justification of an individual text object, but you’ll often find that you need to change the justification of several text objects at one time. AutoCAD offers the Justifytext command for this purpose. To use it, click the Justify tool in the Annotate tab’s Text panel, or type Justifytext↵ at the Command prompt. At the Select objects: prompt, select the text you want to change and then press ↵ to confirm your selection. You’ll see the following prompt in the command line (or at the cursor if Dynamic Input is on):

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

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.

Setting Indents and Tabs

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 9-13 shows that ruler, including tabs 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.

Start by practicing with the indent markers:

1. Save the Unit drawing, and then open the indent.dwg file. This file contains some text with which you’ll experiment.
2. Double-click the text at the top of the drawing to open the Text Editor tab.
3. Press Ctrl+A to highlight all the text in the text editor. This is necessary to indicate the text group to be affected by your indent settings.
4. Click and drag the top indent marker two spaces to the right. The indent of the first line moves with the marker. A note appears above the ruler showing you how much indent you’re applying. Also notice that the text at the first tab remains at its starting location.

   

5. Click and drag the bottom indent marker two spaces to the left. The rest of the paragraph moves with the marker. Again, you see a note by the ruler showing how much indent you’re applying.
6. 
   Click the Close Text Editor tool in the Text Editor tab to exit.

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:

1. 
   Click the Multiline Text tool on the Annotate tab’s Text panel.
2. For the first corner of the text boundary, click the upper-left corner of the large rectangle in the drawing, just below the paragraph.
3. For the opposite corner of the text boundary, click the lower-right corner of the rectangle.
4. Right-click in the text editor, and select Import Text.
5. In the Select File dialog box, locate and select the tabtest.txt file and then click Open. The contents of the tabtest.txt file are displayed in the text editor.

The file you just imported was generated from the Attribute Extraction Wizard in AutoCAD. You’ll learn more about this feature in Chapter 12, “Using Attributes.” 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:

1. Press Ctrl+A to select all the text.
2. Click the ruler at a point that is at the 12th mark from the left (that’s three of the taller tick marks in the ruler). An L-shaped marker appears, and the first tab column of text moves to this position.

   

3. Click the ruler again at the 20th mark. The second tab column aligns to this position.

   

4. Continue to click the ruler to add more tab markers so the text looks similar to Figure 9-14. Don’t worry about being exact; this is just for practice. After you’ve placed a marker, you can click and drag it to make adjustments.

   

5. Click Close Text Editor in the Text Editor tab’s Close panel. The text appears in the drawing as a door schedule.

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 10). Still, the previous 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:

1. Double-click the text at the top of the indent.dwg drawing (the one you edited in the first part of this section), and then press Ctrl+A to select all the text.
2. Right-click the ruler above the text editor, and select Paragraph to open the Paragraph dialog box (see Figure 9-15). The Paragraph dialog box also lets you set other paragraph settings, such as alignment, spacing between paragraphs, and line spacing in the paragraph.

   

3. Change the value in the First Line box to 1.5 and the Hanging box to 2.2.
4. Double-click the tab position box in the upper-left corner, just below the row of tab symbols in the Tab group. Enter 2.2, and click the Add button.
5. Click OK. The text now appears indented from the numbers.

   

6. Click the Close Text Editor tool in the Close panel. The text in the drawing is now formatted as it appeared in the text editor.
7. Close but do not save the indent.dwg file.

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 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 boxes, you enter a numeric value for paragraph indents. As you’ve just seen, you can use the First Line and Hanging boxes to create a numbered list by setting the Hanging box value to be the same as the first tab stop position.

What Do the Fonts Look Like?

You’ve already seen a few of the fonts available in AutoCAD. Chances are that you’re familiar with the TrueType fonts available in Windows. You have some additional AutoCAD fonts from which to choose. You may want to stick with the AutoCAD fonts for all but your presentation drawings because other fonts can consume more memory.

Figure 9-16 shows the basic AutoCAD text fonts. The Romans font is perhaps the most widely used because it offers a reasonable appearance while consuming little memory. Figure 9-17 lists some of the symbols and Greek fonts.

In the following sections, you’ll work with some of the AutoCAD fonts. You can see samples of all the fonts, including TrueType fonts, in the preview window of the Text Style dialog box. If you use a word processor, you’re probably familiar with at least some of the TrueType fonts available in Windows and AutoCAD.

Adding Simple Single-Line Text Objects

You might find that you’re entering a lot of single words or simple labels that don’t require all the bells and whistles of the multiline text editor. AutoCAD offers the single-line text object, which is simpler to use and can speed text entry if you’re adding only small pieces of text.

Continue the tutorial on the Unit.dwg or the 9b-unit.dwg sample file by trying the following exercise:

1. Adjust your view so that you see the part of the drawing shown in Figure 9-18.

   

2. Make sure Note1 is the current text style, and then, from the Multiline Text flyout on the Annotate tab’s Text panel, click the Single Line tool, or enter Dt↵.

   

3. At the Specify start point of text or [Justify/Style]: prompt, pick the starting point for the text you’re about to enter, just below the kitchen at coordinate 17′-2″,22′-5″ (490,664 for metric users). Note that the prompt offers the Justify and Style options.
4. At the Specify rotation angle of text <0>: prompt, press ↵ to accept the default, 0. You can specify any angle you like at this prompt (for example, if you want your text aligned with a rotated object). You see a text I-beam cursor at the point you picked in step 3.
5. Type Kitchenette. As you type, the word appears directly in the drawing.
6. This time, you want to label the bathroom. Pick a point to the right of the door swing; you can approximate the location since you can always adjust the text location later. The text cursor moves to that point.
7. Type Bathroom↵. Figure 9-18 shows how your drawing should look now.
8. Press ↵ again to exit the Text command.

Here you were able to add two single lines of text in different parts of your drawing fairly quickly. Text uses the current default text style settings. If you want to create a column of single-line text, you can press ↵ to move the cursor down to start a new line below the one you just entered.

To edit single-line text, you can double-click the text. The text is highlighted, and you can begin typing to replace it all, or you can click a location in the text to make single word or character changes.

This is the end of the tutorial section of this chapter. The rest of this chapter offers additional information about text.

Justifying Single-Line Text Objects

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 that 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 9-19 shows the relationship between single-line text and the insertion point based on different justification settings.

To set the justification of text as you enter it, you must enter J↵ at the Specify start point of text or [Justify/Style]: prompt after issuing the Text command. You can also change the current default style by entering S↵ and then the name of the style at the Specify start point of text or [Justify/Style]: prompt.

After you’ve issued Text’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. (We’ve left Fit and Align until last because they require more explanation.)

1. Center Centers the text on the start point with the baseline on the start point.
2. Middle Centers the text on the start point with the baseline slightly below the start point.
3. Right Justifies the text to the right of the start point with the baseline on the start point.
4. TL, TC, and TR TL, TC, and TR stand for Top Left, Top Center, and Top Right. When you use these justification styles, the text appears entirely below the start point, justified left, center, or right, depending on which option you choose.
5. ML, MC, and MR ML, MC, and MR stand for Middle Left, Middle Center, and Middle Right. These styles are similar to TL, TC, and TR except that the start point determines a location midway between the baseline and the top of the lowercase letters of the text.
6. BL, BC, and BR BL, BC, and BR stand for Bottom Left, Bottom Center, and Bottom Right. These styles too are similar to TL, TC, and TR, but here the start point determines the bottommost location of the letters of the text (the bottom of letters that have descenders, such as p,q, and g).
7. Align and Fit With the Align and Fit justification options, you must specify a dimension in which the text is to fit. For example, suppose you want the word Refrigerator to fit in the 26″-wide box representing the refrigerator. You can use either the Fit or the Align option to accomplish this. With Fit, AutoCAD prompts you to select start and end points and then stretches or compresses the letters to fit within the two points you specify. You use this option when the text must be a consistent height throughout the drawing and you don’t care about distorting the font. Align works like Fit, but instead of maintaining the current text style height, the Align option adjusts the text height to keep it proportional to the text width without distorting the font. Use this option when it’s important to maintain the font’s shape and proportion. Figure 9-20 demonstrates how Fit and Align work.

   

You can change the justification of single-line text by using the Properties palette, but the text moves from its original location while maintaining its insertion point. If you want to change the justification of text without moving the text, you can use the Justifytext command. Click the Justify tool in the Annotate tab’s Text panel, or type Justifytext at the Command prompt, and then select the text you want to change. Justifytext works on both multiline and single-line text.

Using Special Characters with Single-Line Text Objects

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 the 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 9-2 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 ⇒ All Programs ⇒ Accessories ⇒ System Tools ⇒ Character Map. You can then use the procedure discussed in the section “Adding Symbols and Special Characters” earlier in this chapter to cut and paste a character from the Character Map dialog box. If you use the Character Map dialog box often, create a shortcut for it and place the shortcut in your Start menu or on your Desktop.

Using the Check Spelling Feature

Although AutoCAD is primarily a drawing program, you’ll find that some of your drawings contain more text than graphics, and so AutoCAD does include a spell checking tool. If you’ve ever used the spelling checker in a typical word processor, such as Microsoft Word, the operation in AutoCAD will be familiar to you.

How Check Spelling Works

The hardest part to using the Check Spelling tool is locating it in the Ribbon. Try the following to see how it works:

1. 
   Click the Check Spelling tool in the Annotate tab’s Text panel. You can also type Sp↵. The Check Spelling dialog box appears (see Figure 9-21).

   

2. You can click the Start button to check the spelling in the entire drawing. Or if you prefer, you can be more selective by choosing an option from the Where To Check drop-down list. You can select a mixture of multiline and single-line text as well as dimension text, attributes, and text in Xrefs.

When the spelling checker finds a word it doesn’t recognize, the Check Spelling dialog box shows you the word along with a suggested spelling. If the spelling checker finds more than one spelling, a list of suggested alternate words appears below the box. You can then highlight the desired replacement and click the Change button to change the misspelled word, or you can click Change All to change all occurrences of the word in the selected text. If the suggested word is inappropriate, choose another word from the replacement list (if any) or enter your own spelling in the Suggestions box. Then click Change or Change All.

Here is a list of the options available in the Check Spelling dialog box:

1. Add To Dictionary Adds the word in question to the current dictionary.
2. Ignore Skips the word.
3. Ignore All Skips all occurrences of the word in the text being checked.
4. Change Changes the word in question to the word you’ve selected from (or entered into) the Suggestions box.
5. Change All Changes all occurrences of the current word when there are multiple instances of the misspelling.
6. Dictionaries Lets you use a different dictionary to check spelling. This option opens the Dictionaries dialog box, described in the upcoming section.

The Check Spelling feature includes types of notations that are more likely to be found in technical drawings. It also checks the spelling of text that is included in block definitions, externally referenced files, and dimensions.

Choosing a Dictionary

Clicking the Dictionaries button in the Check Spelling dialog box opens the Dictionaries dialog box (see Figure 9-22), where you can select a 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 US version of AutoCAD is Enu.dct.

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 then, in the Autodesk^® Exchange window, select the Search tab. Enter Dctmain to learn more about the Dctmain system variable.

You can also select a dictionary from the Files tab of the Options dialog box (see Figure 9-23; 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.

Substituting Fonts

At times, you’ll want to change all the fonts in a drawing quickly. For instance, you might need to convert the font of a drawing received from another office to a font that conforms to your own office standards. The Fontmap system variable works in conjunction with a font-mapping table, enabling you to substitute fonts in a drawing easily.

The font-mapping table is an ASCII file called Acad.fmp, which is located in the C:UsersUser NameAppDataRoamingAutodeskAutoCAD 2015R20.0enuSupport folder. You can also use a file you create yourself. You can give this file any name you choose, as long as it has the .fmp extension.

This font-mapping table contains one line for each font substitution you want AutoCAD to make. A typical line in this file reads as follows:

romant; C:Program FilesAutodeskAutoCAD 2015Fonts	xt.shx

In this example, AutoCAD is directed to use the txt.shx font in place of the romant.shx font. To execute this substitution, you type Fontmap↵Fontmap_filename↵.

Fontmap_filename is the font-mapping table you created. This tells AutoCAD where to look for the font-mapping information. Then you issue the Regen command to view the font changes. To disable the font-mapping table, type Fontmap↵.

You can also specify a font-mapping file in the Files tab of the Options dialog box. Look for the Text Editor, Dictionary, And Font File Names listing. Click the plus sign next to this listing, and then click the plus sign next to the Font Mapping File listing to display the name and location of the current default font-mapping file. If you hold the cursor over the name, AutoCAD displays the full location of the file (see Figure 9-24).

You can double-click this filename to open the Select A File dialog box. From there, you can select a different font-mapping file.

Finding and Replacing Text

One of the most time-consuming tasks in drafting is replacing text that appears repeatedly throughout a drawing. Fortunately, you have a Find And Replace tool to help simplify this task. Find And Replace in AutoCAD works like any other find-and-replace tool in a word processing program. A few options work specifically with AutoCAD. Here’s how it works:

1. Enter the text you want to locate in the Find Text box located in the middle of the Annotate tab’s Text panel (see Figure 9-25), and then click the magnifying glass to the right. The Find And Replace dialog box opens, and the drawing area displays the part where the text has been found.

   

2. Enter the replacement text in the Replace With box.
3. When you’ve made certain that this is the text you want to change, click Replace. If you want to replace all occurrences of the text in the drawing, click Replace All.
4. If you want to skip over the found text, click Find Next to locate the next instance of the text in your drawing. If the text is not found, AutoCAD returns to your original view.

You can also enter Find↵ at the Command prompt to open the Find And Replace dialog box and then enter the text you want in the Find What text box.

To limit your find-and-replace operation to a specific set of objects in your drawing, choose Selected Objects from the Find Where drop-down list. Once you’ve selected this option, click the Select Objects tool in the upper-right corner of the Find And Replace dialog box (see Figure 9-26).

When you click the Select Objects tool, the Find And Replace dialog box closes temporarily to enable you to select a set of objects or a region of your drawing. Find And Replace then limits its search to those objects or the region you select.

You can further control the types of objects that Find And Replace looks for by clicking the More Options tool in the lower-left corner of the Find And Replace dialog box. The dialog box expands to show more options (see Figure 9-27).

With this dialog box, you can refine your search by limiting it to blocks, dimension text, standard text, or hyperlink text. You can also specify whether to match the case and find whole words only.

The Bottom Line

1. Prepare a drawing for text. AutoCAD offers an extensive set of features for adding text to a drawing, but you need to do a little prep work before you dive in.
   1. Master It Name two things you need to do to prepare a drawing for text.
2. Set the annotation scale and add text. Before you start to add text, you should set the annotation scale for your drawing. Once this is done, you can begin to add text.
   1. Master It In a sentence or two, briefly describe the purpose of the annotation scale feature. Name the tool you use to add text to a drawing.
3. Explore text formatting in AutoCAD. Because text styles contain font and text-size settings, you can usually set up a text style and then begin to add text to your drawing. For those special cases where you need to vary text height and font or other text features, you can use the Formatting panel of the Text Editor tab.
   1. Master It What text formatting tool can you use to change text to boldface type?
4. Add simple single-line text objects. In many situations, you need only a single word or a short string of text. AutoCAD offers the single-line text object for these instances.
   1. Master It Describe the methods for starting the single-line text command.
5. Use the Check Spelling feature. It isn’t uncommon for a drawing to contain the equivalent of several pages of text, and the likelihood of having misspelled words can be high. AutoCAD offers the Check Spelling feature to help you keep your spelling under control.
   1. Master It What option do you select in the Check Spelling dialog box when it finds a misspelled word and you want to accept the suggestion it offers?
6. Find and replace text. A common activity when editing technical drawings is finding and replacing a word throughout a drawing.
   1. Master It True or false: The Find And Replace feature in AutoCAD works very differently from the find-and-replace feature in other programs.