Maintain Text Orientation Relative to Layout

Have you ever needed to rotate a view in a viewport, but wanted the text in that view to stay horizontal relative to the paper? If you're using annotative text styles, making this happen is as simple as checking a box.

In the Text Style Manager, an annotative text style can be set to "match text orientation to layout" -- in other words, no matter what the angle of your view is, the text will always stay horizontal.

This property can also be set on the fly for individual annotative text objects. When it's set to Yes, you can see that the Rotation property has been grayed out, because the orientation is now determined by the view angle.

The screenshot below shows two views of the same plan area, with the view on the right rotated 90 degrees. "Den" has been set to maintain orientation, while "Office" has not. (Note: this works best if you use the UCS and PLAN commands through a layout viewport. If you try to work with this in modelspace, you won't be able to rotate the text, but you also won't necessarily see the text at the correct orientation. Makes sense, really, since it's the layout and not the model that determines the rotation.)

Well, this is it -- the last post of 2008! Autodesk traditionally takes the week between Christmas and New Year's off, and the way it worked out this year, we'll be off all the way to January 5th. So, Happy Holidays to all my blog readers, and look for more tips, tricks, and news in the new year!