From the course: AutoCAD 2022 Essential Training

Aligning text - AutoCAD Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD 2022 Essential Training

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Aligning text

- [Instructor] We're starting a new chapter now. And I want to show you some more text annotation techniques in AutoCAD. I've shown you already in the learning AutoCAD course how to set up your text, your tech text styles, and how to work with things like single line text and multiline text. The techniques I'm going to show you now with text annotation are further on from that. There are a little bit of a deeper dive into the annotation you can use in your AutoCAD drawings. Talking of drawings we've got a new drawing for you. It's called using text dot DWG. And as usual you can download it from the library to follow along with these videos in this chapter, you'll recognize it. It's pretty similar to the drawings we've been using all the way through the videos in each of the chapter of this course. Now I've added a few extra bits for you. If you go to the home tab on the ribbon and go to the layer dropdown you'll see there's a text layer available, select the word text to make sure it's the current drafting layer and that you're on that layer. Now we're going to go to the annotation fly out here on the annotation panel as well. And you'll notice that we've got labels model 250 millimeters. That's one of the text styles in this drawing. So make sure you're using this one here. Labels model 250 millimeters. Now, the reason we're using that particular text style is it will create labels in the model space that are 250 millimeters high. And it doesn't matter what height they are. They're just labels to show people. What's what in your drawing. Now I've done that in a deliberate way. Let me just jump back to that fly out a second and go back to the text styles. You'll see there, we have labels model 250 millimeters. So that's telling you that the labels are to be used in the model tab and they're 250 millimeters high. Not to be confused with title layout 10 millimeters which I've just clicked on in error very easily. So I've done that deliberately because you can see that you can pick a text style just by clicking on it. Now, the reason I've done that is you need to make sure that you're using the appropriate text style that might have been set up for the particular space in AutoCAD that you're working on. So title layout 10 millimeters is for layout tabs. Labels model 250 millimeters is for the model tab. And I always put that in each of the names of my text styles. One is a reminder to me to make sure that I use the appropriate text style for my text in my AutoCAD drawing in the appropriate space. So if I see it's got model in it I'll use it in the model space in the model tab. If it's got layout in it, I'll use it in one of my layout tabs, perhaps on a title block, for example. So just make sure in that fly out and in the text styles there you are using the labels model 250 millimeter text style. Now we're just going to place a few labels in our drawing and I'm going to show you various ways of aligning your text and making sure it fits nicely. We're going to zoom in on this area with all the desks and chairs here. Just zoom in nice and tight like so, you'll see the room number there, WS001. So you need to be near that. And then what we're going to do we're going to place some multi line text. So go to the annotation panel on the home tab on the ribbon click on the fly out and you want multi line text like so. Now you'll see how big that text is. Multi line text gives you a little preview based on your text style there. Can you see the ABC next to the cross here? I'm going to pick an area here, click and I'm going to drag it across to about there and click again. And then my text editor kicks in as you can see on the ribbon and the text area kicks in that I've selected on screen here with a little ruler a bit like Microsoft Word. Now I'm just going to type the text in first and then I'm going to worry about the justification. So this is going to be the hot desking area. Okay. So hot desking area and what we'll do as well. We'll press enter, go down a line. We'll open up our parentheses there and put staff only like so, now you see that is justifying at the moment to the left-hand side it's defaulting to a left-hand justification. Now I'm going to show you how to change that in a moment. What I'd want you to do is come out from the text editor. You can click on close text editor or just click away from the text. And there's our multiline text using that labels text style. Now I don't want it left-hand justified. What I want to do is give it a different justification. Now, the lovely thing about this is I hover over the text, click on it once like so, and you can see it highlights it and I can make it bigger and smaller. And I can drag these arrows here to change the column width and also drag there to change the column heights. I can also click on this grip and it just changes the location of the multiline text. If I double-click on the text though, what'll happen is it goes back into the text editor. I'm going to highlight the text and I'm going to change my justification here and align the text to top center like so. And can you see the text centers there in the text editing area? So I just click away and that now is justified the way I want it to be but I now want to align it to something. I want it to look a bit neater. So what I could do here is select it. And now the grip is top center like so. So I'm going to click there on the grip and I can move the text around. And now I can do something like a shift and right click and go for a mid between two points. And I'm going to go end point and end point on those two lines there. Can you see that line there, that line there that are part of those two blocks, that form the desks. If I hit escape to deselect that now sits nicely. If I zoom out, I've aligned that neatly and it just aligns nicely with some of the geometry there in the drawing itself. So that's using multi line text. What about single line text? If I want to align something that is single line? Well, let's have a look at that. We've got the archiving area. Do you remember that we put the gradient fill on here? Let's zoom in on that area there. And what I want to do is I've got this little area here and this is shelving. So what I want to do is put the word shelving here but I want it vertical and aligning with something. So let's do some single line text this time. Let's go to the annotation panel, click on the fly out and select single line text. I come into the drawing area, right click justify. And this time there's actually an align option. So I click on align and it says, specify first end point of text baseline. Okay, I'm going to go there left click, second end point I'm going to go up to this end point here and left click. And now all I've got to do is type in the text itself. So you see there's a little flashing cursor there. I'm going to type shelving like so, I press enter once, enter twice and it aligns it with the line based on those two end points that I've clicked on. So the align function in the single line text is really useful because it's given me the shelving there. Now, obviously that text is a little bit too big. So ideally what I could do there is do a manual change. It doesn't have to be the 250 millimeters. I can change the properties of it. So I select it, right click go to properties on the shortcut menu. And the height of it at the moment is a little bit too high because what it's done is it's aligned with the line and sized it between those two points. So whilst it's using the 250 millimeter text style the height is relative to those two points I've suggested. So ideally we want to reduce that to the 250. So it aligns now, if you (mumbles) with the text style, press enter to confirm and you'll see that it doesn't change. Now, the reason it won't change is because it's aligned. So how do we get out of that? How do we change that? Well, what we can do there is we can place the text in a different way, but I'm going to close the properties palette, hit escape to de-select and I'm going to select my text and I'm just going to delete it like so. I'm going to zoom in a little I'm going to go back to my single line text here and I'm going to pick a point end point of text baseline. That'll align it. I don't want to do that on a right click justify. And I want this time bottom center, BC. Specifying bottom center point of the text. That's going to be the mid point of the shelf there. So I've hovered over that mid point. Ideally, I want that mid point there though. Just be careful, which midpoint you select. And there's my midpoint. Now here's the trick, specify the rotation angle of the text. It doesn't have to be zero here in horizontal. I can put in 90 degrees and press enter to confirm. And now that text will rotate at 90 degrees. So when I type in shelving this time not only will it adhere to the 250 millimeters, unlike the align option but it will also when I press enter once enter twice, rotate the text through 90 degrees it's even slightly off the shelf as well. Which the align one actually places it on the line. So I've now got shelving. And if I zoom out slightly you can see their shelving sits nice and neatly in the drawing using the text style and using the appropriate height of text from that text style as well. So there's some really neat little features there that allow you to align your text using the justification, the object snaps within AutoCAD and placing your text accurately more importantly in a way that it's easy to read on your drawings.

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