Controlling appearance using styles - AutoCAD Tutorial

In most drawings, you'll have text that represents several different things. Callouts. Titles. Legends. Even company logos. For this reason, Audocad allows us to create text styles, such that each type of text can have its own unique look. In this lesson, we're going to create some text styles. On my screen I have a drawing of a title block that I've been working on. I'm going to zoom in on the lower right corner, and, I'd like to start by looking at the text styles that we have in this drawing. To do that I'll click to expand the Annotation panel, and then I'll click to open Text Style Menu. And you can see that we only have one style, called Standard. This is the style that was used to create all of this text. That's why it all looks the same. Let's create a new style. To do that I'm going to click Manage Text Styles. This brings up the Text Style dialog box. Over here on the left is a listing of all of the styles that I have in the current drawing. On the right I have some icons I can use to manage my styles. I'm going to click New, and I'm going to create a text style called Title Text. It's a good idea to name your styles based on what the text is going to be used for. I'll click okay, and now that I've given my style a name, I'm going to open the font menu, and I'll select a font. As I drag up and down through this list, I'm sure the fonts look different than what you see on your screen, everybody's system is unique. Pay note to the icons in front of the font name. The TT represents true type. This is a Windows font. And the caliper represents that this font was installed with your AutoCAD. I am going to select the Arial Narrow font for my style. Then I'll come over to the font style menu and I'll choose Bold Italic. Notice how you can see the preview update in the corner. I can use the height setting to hard code a height on the style. That way any time I create text using the style, it will automatically be assigned this height. I'm going to leave this at zero for right now. By doing that, any time I create text with this style, I'll have an opportunity to assign a height. Using this check box annotative, such that it properly sizes itself for the scale of my plot. This is a topic that's best to be saved until we talk about plotting. Down at the bottom of the dialog box, you'll find several special effects. For instance, we could make the style upside down, backwards. I can adjust the width factor to chance the width of the characters. I'll set this back to 1, and I can assign an oblique angle. This text already has an italic property. If I enter an angle here, I can push this over even further. I'm going to set this back to zero, and when I'm finished adjusting my text style settings I'll click apply and close. Title text is now the current text style, so any text that I create from this point on will conform to those properties. Let's create some text. I'm going to click to open the Text menu. And I'll choose Single Line. I'll click on Screen to start my text. And I'm going to give this a height of 0.20. I'll accept the rotation angle of zero. And I'll type, this is what title text looks like. Now let's change the current text style. I'll come back and expand the Annotation panel. I'll open the Text Style menu and I'll choose Standard this time. I'll create another single-line text object right above the previous one using a height of 0.20 and a rotation angle of 0. This is what Standard text looks like. Let's make one more style. Maybe I'd like to create some specialized text for my general notes. I'm going to open the annotation panel. I'll click the Text Style icon. I'm going to create a new style called general notes. I'll open the front menu. Since this list is quite long I'm going to use a shortcut. I'm going to type the letter c. That takes me to that point alphabetically in the list. And I'm going to choose city blue print for my font. I will accept all of the other settings and I'll click Apply and close. Let's create another single line text object. Using the same height and rotation angle. This is what general notes looks like. The best part about having your text properties controlled by a style is that, if you have to make changes later, all you have to do is update the style, and all of your text will change, automatically. For example, all of the text that we see in this title block was created using the standard style. Let's change the properties of that style. We'll go right back to the Text Style dialogue box. I'm going to select the Standard style. And let's change the font. I'll open the menu and then I'm going to use my keyboard shortcut. I'll type the letter T to go to that area alphabetically in the list. And I'm going to choose Times New Roman. Let's also give this style an italicized look. I'll click Apply. And close. And then to get the text objects to update, I need to regen. I'll type r+e and press Enter. And, you can see that all of the text objects created using the standard style, now can form to the new properties of that style. Let's make one more change. I'm going to select all of these large text objects and then I'll come over to the Properties palette. Mine happens to be anchored to the interface. If yours is not, you can press Ctrl+1 to bring your palette up on screen. We'll drag down to the text settings, and I'm going to open the Style menu. And notice as I drag across these styles we can see the text update on screen. Let's change the style of these objects to the title text style. When I'm finished, I'll press Escape to deselect. As you can see, using text styles we can add variety to the appearance of our annotation. Later on, if changes are necessary, we can simply simply change the style and all related objects will update automatically.