From the course: AutoCAD: Effective Annotating

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From the course: AutoCAD: Effective Annotating

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- So in this chapter, we're going to look at different types of annotation to you in AutoCAD. So you'll notice we have a new drawing open at the top of the screen, there, it's "02_TypesOfAnnotation.dwg." You can obviously download the exercise file to follow along with the videos, as usual. And you can see it looks remarkably similar to the exercise file from the previous chapter. In fact, it's exactly the same. Basically, what we're going to do here, is add some different types of annotation, and look at existing types of annotation that are already in the drawing, as well. So in this particular video, we're going to look at text, and how text works in the AutoCAD drawings. Now, there's different ways of accessing your annotation in AutoCAD, which I haven't actually mentioned yet. You can go to the Annotate tab up here on the ribbon, and as you can see, we have a Text panel here. And if I click on this arrow here, I can go in and edit my text styles, if I need to. Now I can do it that way, or I can go back to the Home tab on the ribbon, and I've got the Annotation panel here. If I click on the fly-out there, there's my text style there, if I click on the A with the paintbrush I go back into the text style dialog again, like so. Now you'll notice we've got a current text style of "Dims_MODEL." That's using the font name Verdana, font style is Regular, it's a true-type font, so you can set it out to do things like Bold, Italic, and so on. I'm going to leave it at regular. Now you'll notice the height there is set to zero. So what the means is, every time you place a piece of text using this particular text style, AutoCAD will always prompt you for a text height. That's because the height is set to zero. Now, if I just set that as the current style and close that now, that becomes my current text style that I use in the drawing. Now the next thing I do in the home tab is go to my layers here, and you'll notice in the layer properties, I don't actually have a text layer yet. So, let's create that. Let's jump in here click on New Layer, like so, call it Text, and you'll notice all my layers there are in capitals. You can use capitals if you want to. I'll press enter, like so, and you'll notice there that the text layer has adopted the red from what is the current layer at the moment, the Hatch layer. I don't want it to be red, I want it to be 20, so it matches my DIMS. So, I click on the color. I'm going to change that to 20, which is just up here, that little button there. See it goes to color 20, click on OK. That's all set up. To make text the current layer, I can double-click here, on the little sheet of paper, green tick goes there. Current layer Text. Close the layer properties manager. I can also just go to the layers panel, click on the fly-out here, and select the word Text, and that will also make Text the current drafting layer. So let's look now at the different types of text I've got. I've got single line text, and I've got multi-line text. Now I can approach these here, In the Annotation panel on the Home tab on the ribbon. There's multi-line text and single line text, And I can also go to the Annotate tab on the ribbon, and you can see there, there's multi-line text and single line text again. So you an approach it in different ways. I'm going to go to single line text first and come into the drawing area. Prompts me for the start line of my text. Now I can snap to something, or I can just right-click and select justify. That gives me the options for all of the different justifications. I'm just going to go with Left, which is the default. And then I click on a point in the drawing area, like so. And it prompts me because the text style is set to zero as a height, for the height of the text. It's got 25 there, I'm just going to accept that and press enter. If it's not 25, type in 25 and press enter. It then prompts you for the rotation angle. Do you want it zero, horizontal, 90, vertical, et cetera. I'm going to press enter to accept zero, and there's my little cursor, ready to start typing. So I'm going to type there "Typical cross section," which is what my little object there is in the drawing. Now as soon as I do that, my cursor goes to the end of the text. When I press Enter with single line text, it now prompts me to create another piece of single line text. Each line of single line text is a separate AutoCAD object. So I put a scale there of say one to four, for example. Press enter again, and if I press enter without any text, it closes the single line text command. But as you can see, each one of those, when I hover over, is a separate individual object on the text layer. Now the other type of text I've got, if I come here and click on the fly-out and go to multi-line text, is my multi-line text. Now you'll notice there, can you see there's an ABC on my crosshair. That's the preview of the multi-line text. So you can see there, on my ABC, if I now pick a point, I can click, and I can drag and place my multi-line text in an area. As soon as I click that second time, you'll see that I get a sort of editing bar in the drawing area, where the cursor is, right there, but you'll notice the ribbon changes, as well. So I've now got my Text Editor tab in the ribbon. Now multi-line text is a lot more sophisticated than single line text. It's almost like a word processor in AutoCAD. So I've got things like paragraphing, formatting. I can insert columns and symbols and fields, and I can find and replace, and I can spell check. So if I do the same again, typical cross section, you'll notice that it's adopted the previous height of the single line text there. Over on the left-hand side of the ribbon, where it says Style, in the little box there it says 25. So the text will look exactly the same. Typical cross section. Now when I press enter this time, it takes me to the next line down. I put one to four in there again, just like the other bit of text. But can you notice, because the box I placed isn't as long as the single line text, it's automatically dropped the text down for me, just like it would in Word, for example. So, what I've got to do there is close now, the multi-line text editor. And you can see that its a different layer of text there. But if I click on it, like so, I've got some editing arrows. If I click on this little arrow here, and drag that across a tad, can you see I'm resizing the space where the text sits. Click again, hit Escape to deselect. They look exactly the same. Cause they are using the same text style, same text height, same text rotation, same color, same layer, and so on. But they're two different types of text. Single line text, as you can see, each line of text is a separate object. Multi-line text, if I click on it once, like that, you can see there that it shows me the area where it fits, and I can change the area. If I double-click on the text, Can you see Text Editor appears on the ribbon again, the Editor also appears on the screen with the ruler and the size of the multi-line text area. So, that's your different types of text when you're annotating in AutoCAD.

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