From the course: AutoCAD: Effective Annotating

Setting up a text layer - AutoCAD Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD: Effective Annotating

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Setting up a text layer

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- [Announcer] We're now entering a new chapter of the Annotating Effectively in AutoCAD Course, and we're going to start looking now at using text effectively in our drawings. Now, what I've done, is kept a really simple drawing format for all of this course. So you will recognize this drawing as and when, because, obviously, you can see it's the same as the previous chapter. And the reason I do that is purely to make sure that you've got a nice, simple example to work to. So, the drawing name is 03_UsingText.dwg. You can download that from your account, and, obviously, use the exercise file to follow along with the videos in this chapter. So, the first thing we're going to look at is setting up a text layer. Always, always, always put your text on a separate layer to every other object in your drawing. That way, you can switch that layer on or off, you can freeze it or thaw it, and it just allows you to manage all of your text on your AutoCAD drawing. So, what I'm going to do here, is I'm just going to pan across slightly over here like that. And what I'm going to do is just place a little bit of text over here after I've created my text layer. So I go to the 'Home' tab on the ribbon, into the layer panel, and I go into 'Layer Properties' here. And there's my Layer Properties Manager. Now, you'll notice we've already got a Title Text Layer. That's for the text on the title block in the Layout Tab. So, I've already got a text layer in this drawing, but I only use it in the Layout Tab. I need a Text Layer that I can use in my drawing. So I'm going to come up here and click on 'New Layer', like so, and it gives me the usual default 'layer one'. I'm just going to call it 'Text'. No prizes there for imagination or anything else, but I want to make sure that it has the same properties as my dimensions layer. Reason being is that everything's consistent in the drawing area, so you'll notice that the 'DIMS' layer has the color 20, whereas at the moment, my text layer has adopted the current layer properties, which are color 30. So I'm going to click there and color 20 is that one just there, so I click there, there's my color 20, I come in, click on 'OK', and there's my text layer, color 20, continuous linetype, obviously, because it's text. I'm going to double click, just there, on the little sheet of paper to make it the current drafting layer, And at the top, there, it's telling me 'Current Layer TEXT'. So I can close the Layer Properties Manager, and when I go to my Layer Panel now, you can see the text there is the current drafting layer. So when I start placing text in Mods CAD Drawing, it's going to go automatically onto that current layer, which is text.

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