- [Instructor] Just before we close out this chapter
about our annotation in our AutoCAD drawings,
I want to show you a neat little trick
with aligning text in your AutoCAD drawings.
In the Model tab, what I'd like you to do
is zoom in on this top left area here.
You can see a little round conference table
with four chairs.
Ideally, position your crosshair about there and zoom in.
And you can see
that we've got various bits of text available.
We've got EL5, and that's the orientation
that we want our text to be.
And we've got EL4 here horizontally.
We want to change EL4
and put it into this box here.
Now, we've got ways and means of doing this.
But before we do that,
just make sure that you're on the appropriate layer
in the Layers panel on the Layer dropdown.
You want to be on the A 010 H_ROOM layer.
That's the layer used for our room numbering.
And in the Annotation fly-out here,
in our text styles here,
just click here and make sure
that you're using Arial_2.
That's our text style there, Arial_2.
So make sure you've got the right layer
and the right text style.
Now, I want to show you a neat trick
with single line text.
So if I go to single line text here now,
click on this fly-out here
and select single line text.
Come into the drawing area
and I'm going to right click and justify.
And I'm going to select a line.
Now, normally, you would have thought,
if I'm going to align my text with that vertical empty box
in that smaller conference room,
I'm going to select an endpoint here,
which is our first endpoint of the text baseline,
and then I'm going to select another point here,
which is the second point of the text baseline.
Now, there is actually a little tiny cursor flashing there.
You can't see it very well.
But if I type EL4 like that,
there's my text,
if I press Enter once,
and then Enter twice as if I'm placing a piece
of single line text,
that closes out the single line text command.
The text is orientated beautifully.
It's vertical, like EL5 but it's a bit big.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to select that text like so,
right click, go to Properties on the shortcut menu
and you can see there that that height is a bit weird.
It's at 367.87 millimeters in a metric millimeters drawing.
Not quite what I wanted.
So if I click in the height box there
in the properties, I should be able to delete that,
as you can see.
Type in something like 150,
which is 150 millimeters in the Model tab.
If you were working in feet and inches,
that would be approximately six inches or 0.5 feet.
So I've got a 150 in there.
If I press Enter,
that text should update to the right height.
Normally does, right?
If I click there, no, it doesn't update.
Why is that? What's AutoCAD playing at there?
It's because you're using your aligned justification
because the text is aligning with those two grips
that you can see on the screen.
So it's making sure that the text aligns
to those two grips, obviously first and second point
but also, it's aligning the height of the text
to fit that space.
So the problem we have there
is regardless of our text style,
even a height registered in the text style,
it will always align it to that distance,
those two points.
So it's squishing it to fit between those two blue grips.
So that aligned justification
is not quite what we want.
So close the properties palette
by clicking on the cross.
And we'll right click
and with the text still selected, select Erase.
So what we could do here
is just create some single line text
and align it using our grips
and things like our polar tracking,
object snap tracking, et cetera.
So I'm going to go back up to single line text again here,
click on the fly-out, single line,
right click in the drawing area and justify.
I'm going to go for MC, middle center.
So now it's asking for the middle point of the text.
So the middle point of my text
is going to be here like that
and then I'm going to hover there like that
and then I'm going to come into the middle and click there.
There's the middle point of my text.
Now it's asking for the height of my text
because this particular text style,
the height is set to zero.
So AutoCAD's going to prompt for the height.
I'm going to go for 150, that 150 millimeters
that I wanted previously in the properties pallette,
and press Enter, and then it asks for the rotation angle
of the text.
Well, that's easy.
Zero horizontally, or maybe, hang on a minute,
if I specify the right angle here, like 90 degrees,
what'll happen to the text when I place it?
Well, you can see there that at the moment,
the crosshair is kind of gone to a cursor
and I've got my little flashing cursor for my text.
Let's put the text in, EL4.
Press Enter once, press Enter twice
and that text rotates beautifully.
Aligns to the box where I want it to be.
Now, the reason I wanted to show you that
is you might think that that aligned justification aligns it
to the vertical.
It does align it to the vertical
but it also aligns it to those first
and second baseline points of the text
that you specified.
So your text will adhere to those two points
but it'll also be a specific text type because of that.
Work with the settings that you know are going
to obviously give you accurate text in your drawing.
So what I can do now is I can select EL4 there
and the box there.
They can be removed.
So that's a simple right click and erase.
And now we've got EL5 and EL4 looking nice and consistent
in our ground floor plan REV4 drawing.