From the course: AutoCAD 2017 Essential Training

Working with text styles - AutoCAD Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD 2017 Essential Training

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Working with text styles

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- [Voiceover] We're now in another section of our AutoCAD 2017 essentials course, and we're going to look now at using text in an AutoCAD drawing. Now, you would use text to annotate your drawing and also communicate your design intent in a drawing. So we're staying in the UsingText drawing. Now what I want to show you first of all is setting up your text styles. Now, you can do this in two ways on the ribbon. You'll notice I'm in the Home tab on the ribbon right now, and if I go to the Annotation panel and click on the fly-out here, there's the text style I'm using, which is standard, and there's the Text Style icon. If I click on the Text Style icon, that allows me to go and look at all of the text styles I've currently got in the drawing and also create new ones. I'll just click on Cancel there to close it. I can also go to the Annotate tab on the ribbon, and I can go here, and you'll notice in the text I can select Standard there like so, and I can actually select the different styles and get a little preview. And if I go to Manage Text Styles, that will also upon up the text styles dialog box. So what we're going to do is we're going to create a new text style that we're going to use in this particular drawing. So I'm going to go over here to the New icon, and I'm going to give the style a name. Obviously, the text style needs a name, and I'm going to call it training, and I'm going to put it in capital letters like that. So it's a training text style for the purposes of this lynda.com training course. So I click on OK, and it adds it to the list here on the left-hand side. Now, the font name that you want to use. Now, there's lots of different fonts available. You'll notice the default font is this lovely font in the preview there at bottom left where it says Aa Bb 12. That's txt.shx. SHX is a shape code font. The legacy of those is they come from old AutoCAD versions that were on DOS, and that's where we used to have to physically draw our alphabets and save them as shape codes. Now, with the advent of Windows and Microsoft and everything else, we don't need to use shape codes anymore. If I click on this down arrow here, you'll see all of the TrueType fonts that are denoted with a little TT next to them, and these are all the ones that are available to you from your Windows installation. So if I select something like Verdana, you can see that is a much, much more attractive font to use on your drawing. So I'm going to stick with Verdana for now. That's a perfectly good font name. Now here's a little neat trick, though. If you click on this down arrow, and I want to go to the first font that begins with A, just press A on the keyboard, and you'll start at A, which is the AcadEref. Press A again, goes to the next one. And keep going down, and you can actually toggle through all the ones that begin with A. And can you see you're getting a little preview on the left-hand side? So you can see what they all do. So if I keep going down, there's Arial, probably one of the most commonly used fonts on the planet, so I could use Arial if I wanted to. If I type V, takes me straight to Vani, and then if I press V again, there's Verdana again. So I'm just going to stick with Verdana. It's one of my favorite fonts in an AutoCAD drawing, and you've got different font styles. Because it's a TrueType font with a little TT, you can select things like Regular, Bold, Bold, Italic, or Italic. I'm just going to stick with Regular for now because this is just a default training text style. Now, you can have your text style as annotative. We'll talk about annotative later, and you give it a height if you want to. Now, if you give it a fixed height, it will always come in at that text height on the AutoCAD drawing. If you leave the height at zero, you can actually specify the height in the drawing when you place your text. I personally prefer to do that unless you've got a defined text height that you need for a specific purpose. So I quite often leave that at zero unless I'm creating different sort of text style families. It might be training three millimeters high, training five millimeters high, and then you would specify your heights. Now, the heights are defined by the units in your drawing. The drawing we have behind this dialog box is in metric millimeters. So if I gave that text a height of 10, it will be 10 millimeters high in the model space, I hasten to add. So when you're placing text in the model space, you have to be aware of what the viewport scale is in the layout space, and we will cover that later on in the course, so you don't need to worry about that right now. Now, effects that you can have, upside down text. You can have backwards text. Why would you use backward text? Let's have a little think about that for a moment. What happens when an ambulance pulls up behind you? You can read that it's an ambulance in your rear view mirror. Why can you read it? Because the text is backwards on the bonnet or, in American terms, the hood of the ambulance. Width factor, I can squish it up, make it say 0.5. Squishes it up and makes it smaller. Let's put that back to one, which is, in essence, 100%. Make sure you type that properly, obviously. And you can have an oblique angle. Let's give that, say, 45 degrees, and that slants it over. So it's up to you what you do there, obviously. You can use those tools if you need them. I'm going to apply this new training text style to the drawing now. I've got all the settings that I want. Just have a look at those settings before you click on Apply. Make sure you've got the same settings. Apply, job done, and you can now set that as your current text style. So if I click on Set Current and then close that, you can see that training is now my text style there. If I go back to the Home tab on the ribbon and go to Annotation, training is my text style there as well. So that's how you set up your new text style when you're working with text in your AutoCAD drawings.

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