From the course: AutoCAD 2024 Essential Training

Creating and using text styles - AutoCAD Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD 2024 Essential Training

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Creating and using text styles

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We're starting a new chapter now and we're going to take a look at how we annotate our designs in AutoCAD. Now you may remember the metal plate drawing from the previous chapter. Well we've got a similar type drawing this time. We've got a plan view of a metal plate, sectional view and a side view and we're going to annotate them accordingly. It's called metal plate underscore zero zero two dot DWG. So make sure you download the appropriate drawing from the library and open it up in AutoCAD and we're going to be working primarily in the model tab, bottom left there in AutoCAD. Now we're going to be placing text on the drawing itself so let's have a look at the layers that we've got. Have we got a text layer? Yes we have. Let's go with the text layer. Let's make that our current drafting layer so that when we place text in our AutoCAD drawings it's on the right layer. Now here's a nice thing about AutoCAD 2024 though, if I go to the annotate tab here on the ribbon you'll notice that in the dimensions panel here I've got a dim layer override. Can you see that? So there's a dim layer override so I can tell AutoCAD to use the dimensions layer to place dimensions even when here my current drafting layer is the text layer like so. Quite clever. Now we're going to be creating some text styles first in this video. Now we're going to take a look at the annotation panel on the home tab on the ribbon. Click on the fly out there, pin it open, and you can see that we've got a style for most types of annotation. So I can go to my text styles, my dimension styles, my multi-leader styles, and my table styles. If I unpin that it pops back into the ribbon. If I go to the annotate tab on the ribbon you'll notice here that I've also got a text panel, a dimensions panel, leaders panel and a tables panel. And these little angled arrows here again take me to text style, dimension style, leader style and table style. So I can get to it in lots of different ways. At the moment though we'll just jump to the home tab and we'll expand the annotation panel here and just pin it open for the moment and then we're going to come up to the A with the paintbrush and click on it like so. That'll open up the textile manager. Now you'll notice that we've got various textiles available in the drawing already. Now notice that annotative is the current textile. I'm going to click on new and there's my new textile name. Now the first new textile I'm going to create is going to be called notes and then I'm going to put an underscore and then I'm going to put layout and what that tells me is this is where this text style is going to be used in AutoCAD in the layout tabs. I then underscore again and type in 3.5 millimeters that's going to be the height of the text in this style. I click on okay and there's my notes layout 3.5 millimeters now because annotative was the current textile at the time it's made this particular textile annotative so I need to uncheck that box there I don't want my notes layout 3.5 millimeters to be annotative and we'll talk about annotative scaling later now we can use all the true type fonts in Windows in AutoCAD that's what that little TT means there so I click on the fly out I'm gonna type C on the keyboard and if I go all the way to the top top there there's Calibri so I'm going to use the font name Calibri and the TT indicates it's a TrueType Windows font. I'm going to leave the font style as regular I could use italic or bold I want it to be regular and the height there will be the same as the name of the textile 3.5 millimeters like that. I don't need any effects like upside down backwards leave all of that as it is. Click on apply and that is an invalid height hang on a minute do we want zero or a minimum of a number there hang on let's check that out what have I done wrong it needs a number I've put mm in there remember so just put the number in not the actual unit of measurement click on apply there we go sorted so there's our notes layout 3.5 millimeters click on new again and we're going to create another one now this one's going to be called labels then an underscore and then model this time and then underscore again and 15 millimeters. Click on OK and there's labels model 15 millimeters. We're going to stick with the Calibri but I'm going to change it to bold this time and the height will be 15, 1.5. Remember don't put the mm on for millimeters. No effects needed. We could have it upside down or backwards but we don't really want to so just uncheck those. Click on apply again and that will apply those settings to that particular text style. Now what we're going to be working on is potentially labels and notes there so there's labels there's notes and we can pick one of those to make it the current text style. So if I now click on labels model 15 millimeters so that particular textile gets used in the model tab down here. I can set that as the current textile, close the textile manager and can you see it change there and if I click on the drop down there I can pick any particular textile I want to use at any given time. I'm going to click on the pin there just to unpin it and that'll pop back into the ribbon. So you've now set your text styles in your AutoCAD drawing ready to start placing text for annotation in the drawing.

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