From the course: AutoCAD: Annotation Scaling in Drawings

Setting up a text layer - AutoCAD Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD: Annotation Scaling in Drawings

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Setting up a text layer

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- [Narrator] So we're in another new chapter now of the annotation scaling in the AutoCAD's drawing course. What we're going to do over the following few chapters, is work through all of those annotative objects that we looked at in the previous chapter. But we're going to apply a whole chapter to each individual type of object. See we've got a new drawing open, 03 Annotative Text in this case, so the name kind of gives it away. We're going to look at text and annotation scaling. Now one of the first things that you must do, when you're doing any annotation on any AutoCAD drawing, is make sure that each individual annotation object has its own layer. So we're looking at text, so what we need to do is make sure that we have a text layer that is separate to the other layers in the AutoCAD drawing. It's very very important, because then you can freeze that layer, you can turn that layer off, you can lock that layer if you need to. And it only then locks the text, freezes the text, switches the text off. So, it's very very easy. Go to the hind tab on the ribbon, into the layers panel, which I'm sure you've probably done before, and into layer properties. That opens up the layer properties manager. I'm just going to drag that down slightly so it's more central on the screen there. There we go, like that. You can see there's our layer properties manager. You can see that there's not text layer in there. Very very simple, we click on this little icon here and it gives us a default layer one. I'll call that text in this case, like so. Now you might want to call it text_anno, for annotative, for example, because it's going to be annotative text. You might want to have a text anno layer and a regular text layer, perhaps for labels and things. So that's what I'm going to do, I'm going to set up two layers, text anno like so. And I'll give that the same color as my dimensions so it's all consistent, and that's the color 20. I click here, and the box comes up. Color 20 is just there, so I add color 20, click on okay and that's color 20. Now, I'm going to make that the current layer so I double click on the little sheet of paper next to it, and as you can see now, text anno is the current layer, the annotative text. I'll create another new layer now, and you'll see that adopts the properties of the current layer, the text anno layer, and I'll just call this text, like that. Press enter. Now, the reason I've created those two layers is it gives me the option to be consistent again. I can have all of my annotative text on the text anno layer and all of my regular text that is not annotative, on the regular text layer. Once you've got those layers set up, and text anno is the current layer, you can close the layer properties manager. If I go to the layers panel now, on the home table on the ribbon, you can see that text anno there is the current drafting layer, so we're now ready to start placing annotative text in our AutoCAD drawing.

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