Adding Text to Drawings

CHAPTER 10 ADDING TEXT TO DRAWINGS

One of the more tedious drafting tasks is applying notes to your drawing. Anyone who has had to
manually draft a large drawing containing a lot of notes knows the true meaning of writer’s cramp.
AutoCAD not only makes this job go faster by enabling you to type your notes into the same document
as the corresponding drawing, but it also helps you to create more professional-looking
notes by 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 AutoCAD’s text-creation and -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.
Topics in this chapter include the following:
◆
Preparing a Drawing for Text
◆
Setting the Annotation Scale and Adding Text
◆
Understanding the Text Style Dialog Box Options
◆
Exploring Text Formatting in AutoCAD
◆
What Do the Fonts Look Like?
◆
Adding Simple Single-Line Text Objects
◆
Using the Check-Spelling Feature
◆
Substituting Fonts
◆
Finding and Replacing Text

Preparing a Drawing for Text
In this first section, you’ll go through the process of adding text to a drawing that currently has no
text. By doing this, 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 the
Unit
file, you can use the
file called
10a-unit.dwg
. Metric users should use
10a-unit-metric.dwg
. After it’s open,
choose File 
Save As 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.
Turn off the Flr-pat layer. Otherwise, the floor pattern you added previously will obscure
the text you enter during the exercises in this chapter.
TIP
It’s a good idea to keep your notes on a separate layer, so you can plot drawings containing
only the graphics information or freeze the Notes layer to save redraw/regeneration time.
4.
Set up your view so it looks similar to the top image in Figure 10.1.

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 only
need 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:


TIP
If you don’t like the way the AutoCAD default style is set up, open the
Acad.dwt
template file
and change the Standard text style settings to your liking. You can also add other styles that you
use frequently. Remember, AutoCAD files that use the
.dwt
filename extension are just
AutoCAD
.dwg
files with a slightly different extension to set them apart.
1.
Choose Format 
Text Style, or type
St
↵
. You can also click the Text Style tool in the Text
control panel. This opens the Text Style dialog box.


2.
Click the New to the right of the dialog box to open the New Text Style dialog box.
3.
Enter
Note1 (Note one)
for the name of your new style; then, click OK.
4.
Select a font for your style. In the Text Style dialog box again, click the Font Name drop-down
list in the Font group.
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.


7.
In the Paper Text Height input box, enter
0.1
. You’ll see your input change to
1
⁄
8
˝. Metric
users should enter
0.15
.
8.
Click Apply, and then close the dialog box.
The Annotative option you turned on in step 7 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.
NOTE
Once you’ve created several styles, you can set the default current style by selecting it
from the Text Style drop-down list in the Text control panel.

Getting Familiar With the Text and Annotation Scale Control Panels
Before you get much further into AutoCAD’s text features, take a moment to get familiar with the
Text control panel and the Annotation Scale control panel (see Figure 10.2). You’ll be using a few
of these options in this chapter. If you need to, you can refer to this graphic as you work through
the exercises.


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.
1.
In the lower-right corner of the AutoCAD window, click the arrow next to Annotation Scale.

1.
Click the Multiline Text tool in the Text control panel. You can also choose Draw 
Text 
Multiline Text from the menu bar, or type
MT<.You see a prompt that tells you the current text style and height: Current text style: "Note1" Text height: 1/8 Annotative: Yes Specify first corner: Add/Delete Scale Delete Current Scale Add Current Scale Spell Check Find2. Click the first point indicated in the top image in Figure 10.1 to start the text boundary window. This boundary window indicates the area in which to place the text. Notice the arrow near the bottom of the window: It indicates the direction of the text flow. TIP 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. 3. At the Specify opposite corner of [Height/Justify/Line spacing/Rotation/Style/ Width]: prompt, click the second point indicated in the top image in Figure 10.1. The Text Formatting toolbar appears, with the Multiline Text Editor superimposed over the area you just selected.



4. Click the text panel, and type Entry . As you type, the word appears in the text panel, just as it will appear in your drawing.
5. Press ↵ to advance one line; then, enter 6´ by 7´ .
6. Press ↵ to advance another line, and enter [182 cm by 213 cm] .
7. Press ↵ again to advance another line, and enter carpet floor .
8. Click OK in the Text Formatting toolbar. The text appears in the drawing just as it did in the text editor. (See the bottom image in Figure 10.1.)

NOTE 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. AutoCAD’s word-wrap feature automatically adjusts the text formatting to fit the text boundary.

You may have noticed that the Text Formatting toolbar 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 also perform other word-processing functions such as search and replace, you can import text, and you can make font changes.
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 Formatting toolbar enlarges the text so you can read it clearly. Likewise, if you’re zoomed in too close to see the entire text, the Text Formatting toolbar adjusts the text in its text editor to enable you to see all the text.

TIP If text is included in a selection where a hatch pattern is to be placed, AutoCAD automatically avoids hatching over the text. If you add text over a hatched area, you must rehatch the area to include the text in the hatch boundary.

Exploring Text and Scale
Even though your text height is 0.1˝ or 0.15 cm, it appears at the appropriate 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; but 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:
1.
In the lower-right corner of the AutoCAD window, click the Annotation Scale setting,
and select
1
⁄
4
˝=1´-0˝. Metric users should select 1:50.
2.
Click the Add Current Scale tool in the Annotation Scale control panel, or enter
Objectscale
↵.
3.
At the
Select annotative objects:
prompt, select the text, and press
↵.
4.
At the
Enter an option [Add/Delete/?] :
prompt, press
↵.
5.
At the
Enter named scale to add or [?] <1:50>:
prompt, press
↵.
6.
At the prompt
1 object updated to support annotation scale <1:50>.
Enter named scale to add or [?]:
press
↵.
The text changes to a smaller and more appropriate size for the new scale you selected in step 1.
Now, test your settings by changing the Annotation Scale value back to the previous setting:
1.
In the lower-right corner of the AutoCAD window, click the Annotation Scale setting, and
select
1
⁄
8
˝=1´-0˝. Metric users should select 1:100.
2.
The text changes back to its original size.
In steps 2 through 6 of the first exercise in this section, you added a new annotation scale to the
text. This is necessary in order 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. Once it’s added, you can quickly change between scales by selecting a scale from
the Annotation Scale list.
So far, you’ve only used a single multiline text object; but 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. This is easy to do,
because you have the option to select as many objects as you need when adding annotation scales.

Text and Scale in Legacy Drawings
AutoCAD 2008 offers the Annotation Scale feature to automate the scaling of text and other objects to
their proper sized based on the drawing’s annotation scale. But there is a good chance that you’ll
encounter drawings that were created before the Annotation Scale feature was available. For that reason,
you should have a basic understanding of scale factors as they apply to text.
As you know by now, AutoCAD lets you draw at full scale; that is, you can represent distances as values
equivalent to the actual size of the object. When you later plot the drawing, you tell AutoCAD the scale
at which you want to plot, and the program reduces the drawing accordingly. This gives you the freedom
to enter measurements at full scale and not worry about converting them to various scales every time
you enter a distance. Unfortunately, in earlier versions of AutoCAD, this feature created problems when
users entered text and dimensions. You had to make the text height very large in order for it to be readable
when scaled down.
To illustrate this point, imagine you’re drawing the Unit plan at full size on a very large sheet of paper.
When you’re finished with this drawing, it will be reduced to a scale that enables it to fit on an 8.5˝
×
11˝
sheet of paper. So, you have to make your text large to keep it legible after it’s reduced. If you want text
to appear
1
⁄
8
˝ high when the drawing is plotted, you must convert it to a considerably larger size when
you draw it. To do this, you multiply the desired height of the final plotted text by a scale-conversion factor
(see Chapter 3 for more on scale-conversion factors).
For example, if your drawing is at a
1
⁄
8
˝ = 1´-0˝ scale, you multiply the desired text height,
1
⁄
8
˝, by the scaleconversion
factor of 96 to get a height of 12˝. This is the height you must make your text to get
1
⁄
8
˝-high
text in the final plot.
With AutoCAD 2008, you don’t have to work through the math to get the right text size for your drawing.
But if you encounter a drawing that was created in an earlier version of AutoCAD and you notice that the
text size is very large, you’ll know why.