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AutoCAD 2015 and AutoCAD LT 2015 Bible

The most comprehensive AutoCAD book around!

Create text in columns

Column text was introduced in AutoCAD 2008. Columns make fitting your text into tight spaces easier; it also looks more professional. You may have manually created columns in the past, but when you edited the text, the columns didn’t automatically readjust, leading to awkward spaces or lots of reformatting.

Follow these steps to create column […]

Which font to use?

Don’t know which font to use? Until AutoCAD offers a WYSIWYG font drop-down list (send in your wish lists, folks!), you can print out truetype.dwg, which comes with AutoCAD in the /Sample folder. It probably doesn’t contain all the fonts on your computer but does have a sample of enough fonts for most people.

Tutorials:Dimension in paper space

Dimensioning in paper space has several advantages:

You don’t have to worry about the size of the dimension arrowheads, text, etc. Everything is full size and you plot at 1:1 scale. You can place the dimensions outside the border of the viewport, giving you more room. You can easily dimension some parts of the model […]

Tutorial: Create an architectural dimension style

Are you getting the look you need for your dimensions? Are you constantly making little adjustments? If dimensions aren’t your friend, you need to get more comfortable with dimension styles.

In this tutorial, you create an architectural dimension style. Why? Because the default style is a mechanical look and by changing it to architectural, you’ll […]

Tutorial: Automate annotation scaling with annotative objects

Since AutoCAD 2008, you can automate the sizing of annotation, such as text and dimensions, in multiple viewports with varying scales. In this tutorial, you practice using this feature, called annotative objects.

The following objects can be annotative, meaning that they can size automatically:

Text (single-line text) Mtext (multi-line text) Dimensions Multileaders (which are new […]

The many ways to import text

If you have some text in another location and need it in your AutoCAD drawing, you certainly don’t want to retype it. There are several ways to import text from other documents into your drawing.

The Multiline Text Editor

Save the text as a text (.txt) or Rich Text Format (.rtf) file. (You do that […]

Changing the MText string to your login name

Since AutoCAD 2004, there’s a system variable, MTJIGSTRING, that creates some sample text when you start the MTEXT command. The idea is to help you gauge the size of the text before you create it, so you can change the height if you want. Lambertus Oosterveen sent me this line that you can put in […]

Quickly format dimensions

Usually, it’s best to format your dimensions using a dimension style. If you want an exception to the style, create an override. To create an override, choose Dimension > Dimension Style and click the Override button in the Dimension Style Manager. This method is the best way to maintain your CAD standards.

But sometimes, you […]

How to print a list of text styles

You might also want to print out a list of your text styles. (You can also check for text styles using the CHECKSTANDARDS command.) The procedure is similar to creating a layer list:

At the command line, type -style. At the Enter name of text style or [?] <STANDARD>: prompt, type ? (a question mark) […]

How to print a list of dimension styles

A list of dimension styles is helpful. The plain list doesn’t list the properties of each dimension style, because each style has so many system variables. You can list the settings of any individual style, though. But you can do even better; you can list compare the settings of two dimension styles. Comparing dimension styles […]