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 to 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 you started with.
Adjusting the Text Height and Font
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:
1. Pan your view so the kitchen is just at the top of the drawing, as shown in the first image in
Figure 10.3.
2. Click the Multiline Text tool; then, select a text boundary window, as shown in the first
image in Figure 10.3.
3. In the text editor, type the following:
Living Room
14´-0˝ by 16´-5˝ [427 cm by 500 cm]
Make 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.
4. 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; then, Shift+click the
beginning of the line to highlight the whole line.
5. In the Text Formatting toolbar, click in the Text Height text box and enter 1/16. Metric users,
enter 0.08. The highlighted text changes to a smaller size.
6. Highlight the words Living Room.
7. Click the Font drop-down list to display a list of font options
8. Scroll up the list until you find Arial. The text in the text editor changes to reflect the new font.
9. With the words Living Room still highlighted, click the Underline button in the Text Formatting
toolbar.
10. Click OK in the Text Formatting toolbar. The label appears in the area you indicated in step 2
(see the bottom image in Figure 10.3).
11. To see how you can go back to the Text Formatting toolbar, double-click the text. The Text
Formatting toolbar and text editor appear, enabling you to change the text.
12. Click OK to exit the Text Formatting toolbar.
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 arotation angle for the text window, either graphically with a rubber-banding line or by entering an anglevalue. After you’ve entered a rotation angle, you can resume selecting the text boundary.
Understanding the Text Formatting Toolbar
You’ve just experimented with a few of the Text Formatting toolbar features. A variety of additionalformatting tools are available. Figure 10.4 shows where these tools are, and Table 10.1 describes theiruses. They’re fairly straightforward, and if you’ve used other word-processing programs, you shouldfind them easy to use. Most are common to the majority of word processors, although a few, such asSymbol, Oblique Angle, and Width Factor, are unique to AutoCAD. Look at Table 10.1, and see ifthere are any tools you think you’ll find useful for future reference.
Table 10.1: Text Formatting Tools
Tool Use
Bold/Italic/Underline/Overline Select text, and then select one of these options to add bold, italic,underline, or overline to the text.
Undo/Redo Click to undo or redo current edits.
Stack/Unstack Fraction Select a fraction, and then click this tool to either stack
or unstack the fraction text.
Color Select text, and then choose a color from this drop-down
list.
Ruler Click to turn the ruler at the top of the Text panel on or off.
Columns Indicate the number of columns and how the columns are
set up.
Paragraph Set up paragraph formatting, including tabs, indents, and
paragraph spacing.
Mtext Justification Select the appropriate option to align the text to the top,
middle, bottom,or other position within the text boundary.
Line Spacing Set the line spacing in paragraphs. You can also set line
spacing in theProperties palette for an mtext object, or by
using the Paragraph dialog
box (see “Setting Indents and Tabs” later in this chapter).
Left/Center/Right/Justify/ Click the appropriate tool to align the text to the left, center
Distribute , or rightside of the text boundary. Justify adds space
between words to forceleft and right Distribute adds space between letters toalignment.
force left and right alignment.
Numbering Select a list of text, click this tool, and then select Letter,
Number, or Bullet to add letters, numbers, or bullets to the
list.
Insert Field Click to open the Fields dialog box, where you can add a field
text. See“Adding Formulas to Cells,” in Chapter 11, for more
about fields.
Uppercase/Lowercase Select a single letter or set of words, and then select the
Uppercase orLowercase tool to change the selection’s case.
Symbol Place the cursor at a location for the symbol, and then click the
Symbol tool to find and add a symbol. (See Figure 10.5, later
in this chapter, for theavailable symbols.)
Oblique Angle Select text, and then enter an Oblique Angle value. The effect
is to skewthe text characters in a way similar to an italic
formatting.
Tracking Select text, and then enter a tracking value in the Tracking
text box. Avalue greater than 1 increases the spacing between
letters, and a value lessthan 1 decreases the spacing.
Width Factor Select text, and enter a width value in the Width text box. A
value greaterthan 1 stretches the text, including ivalue
greaterndividual letters, horizontally. A value less than 1
compresses the text, including the letters.
Adding Symbols and Special Characters
The Text Formatting toolbar also offers a tool called Symbol. This tool lets you add special symbols
common to technical drawing and drafting. Figure 10.5 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. Characters such as the trademark (™)
and copyright (©) symbols are often available in the fonts offered in the Character Map dialog box.
The contents of the Symbol drop-down list depend on the font currently selected.
WARNING TheCharacter 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 10.10, 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 10.6 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 that 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.
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, choose Modify Object Text Justify, 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:
[Left/Align/Fit/Center/Middle/Right/TL/TC/TR/ML/MC/MR/BL/BC/BR]
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 optio
Setting Indents and Tabs
You should also know about the indent and tab features of the Text Formatting toolbar’s text
window. You may have noticed the ruler at the top of the text editor. Figure 10.7 shows that ruler,
including tab and indent markers.
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.
Start by practicing with the indent markers:
1. Save the Unit drawing, and then open the Indent.dwg file. This file contains some text that
you’ll experiment with.
2. Double-click the text at the top of the drawing to open the Text Formatting toolbar.
3. Press Ctrl+A to highlight all the text in the text editor. This is necessary to indicate the group
of text 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 OK in the Text Formatting toolbar 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 tabdelimited
text file:
1. Click the Multiline Text tool on the Draw toolbar.
2. For the first corner, click the upper-left corner of the large rectangle in the drawing, just
below the paragraph.
3. For the opposite corner, click the lower-right corner of the rectangle.
4. Right-click in the text editor of the Text Formatting toolbar, and select Import Text.
5. In the Select File dialog box, locate and select the tabtest.txt file. The contents of the
tabtest.txt file are displayed in the text editor.
The file you just imported was generated from the Attribute Extraction feature of 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:
1. Press Ctrl+A to select all the text.
2. Click the ruler at a point that is at the twelfth 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 twentieth 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 10.8.
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 OK on the Text Formatting toolbar. The text appears in the drawing as a door schedule.
create a schedule from scratch by composing it directly in the text editor of the Text Formatting
toolbar. 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:
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.
spacing between paragraphs, and line spacing in the paragraph.
3. Change the value in the First Line input box to 1.5 and the Hanging input box to 2.2.
4. Double-click the tab position input 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 with the text indented from the numbers.
6. Close the Text Formatting toolbar. The text in the drawing is now formatted as it appeared
in the text editor of the Text Formatting toolbar.
7. Exit 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 the tab 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. 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.
TIP You may have noticed the Set Mtext Width and Set Mtext Height right-click shortcut menu
options in step 2 of the preceding exercise. The Set Mtext Width option opens a dialog box that
enables you to enter a width for the text boundary for situations where you need an exact width.
You can also click and drag the right inside edge of the ruler to change the text-boundary width.
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Exploring Text Formatting in AutoCAD
