LT Unlimited

Text editor settings

You know, every time I think I’ve seen in all in AutoCAD LT, I’m proven wrong. (That’s not to say that I know it all…just that I’d like to think that anymore I’m rarely surprised by the existence of a feature.)

So what punctured my illusion this time? An overlooked right-click option in the Multiline Text Editor: Editor Settings.

I admit, I’ve never poked around in here before, but there are some pretty useful options in that list! You can also find most of them in the contextual ribbon tab, but they’re scattered in a few different places.

You can turn the ruler on and off, display a floating formatting toolbar next to the editor, even change the color of highlighted text.

So, now that you know about these settings, which ones will you change?

(And if you’re wondering where I found this little gem of knowledge…where else but the Autodesk forums.)

Annotation Visibility

When you’re working in a drawing that uses annotation scaling, sometimes it can be helpful to see only the annotations that exist at the current scale. But sometimes you want to see the others, too.

That’s where Annotation Visibility comes in. It’s just a little toggle on the status bar that lets you see either all annotative objects, even if they’re not defined for the current scale, or just the ones that apply to the current scale.

In the drawing below, you can see that the right-most dimension is only defined at 20:1, not 40:1. (This screenshot was taken in a layout.)

In model space, with Annotation Visiblity is on (also known as ANNOALLVISIBLE = 1) and the scale set to 1:40, here’s what it looks like:

With Annotation visibility turned off, the 20:1-only dimension disappears.

Just as an FYI, this is what the icon looks like when AV is on (you can see all the objects):

And this is what it looks like off:

I know, it’s a little hard to tell the difference at a glance. But if you’re seeing or not seeing something you expect to see, try switching its value and see if you get what you need.

This setting can be toggled from either model or paper space, but it’s really only relevant in model space, since layouts don’t typically have a scale.

Mask Multiline Text

After last week’s post on background masks for dimension objects, I poked around through my archives and realized I’ve never posted on regular text masks. I know I put it in a demo video, but I guess it never got its own post. Let’s fix that.

When you’re creating or editing multiline text, there’s a button the Formatting panel called Background Mask.

Click on it, and you’ll get a dialog box where you can set the offset factor and the fill color.

The offset factor, how far the mask extends beyond the text, is relative to the text height. A factor of 1 keeps the mask the same size as the text. A factor of 1.5 provides a border equal to half the text height all the way around. The maximum factor for the mask is 5.0.

For the fill color, you can either pick a standard color, or use the background color of the drawing, which basically means it’ll plot clear.

New in 2012, the values you choose when creating a mask for a *new* text object will be remembered for the next time you want to apply a mask. (Previously, they defaulted to 1.5 and red every time.)

The reason this only works for new text objects is that background masks are a property of the text. See?

 

So you have to actively set the variables for a new object before they’ll persist.

 

Mask Dimension Text

Ever have a dimension that’s blocking something in your drawing? It’s probably not something important, or you’d move the dimension, but what if you’re putting a dimension on an image, or over some contour lines where it’s hard to read?

To make your text stand out more clearly, you can enable a background mask or fill color in the dimension style. This setting is on the Text tab, and you can either specify an actual color or just use the background of your drawing.

Here’s what the dimension looks like after setting Fill Color to Background:

This setting is also controlled with the DIMTFILL and DIMTFILLCLR system variables. Setting them at the command line will apply an override to your current dimension style, so that new dimensions get the settings but existing dimensions remain unchanged. To update all dimensions, you can right-click on the “style overrides” in the Dimension Style list and choose “save to current style”.

You can also override the fill value for individual dimensions through the Text section of the Properties Palette.

Override Dimension Scale Factor

Normally, I'm a strong advocate for always drawing objects at full size (1:1) and for never overriding the default dimension text. However, there may be times when one or both of those objectives aren't feasible. Or you just may have a misbehaving dimension, and this post might help you set it straight.

The key (or the culprit, depending on your point of view) is the DIMLFAC system variable, also available on the Primary Units tab of the Dimension Style Manager.

By default, this is set to 1, and in most situations should probably stay that way. If you set DIMLFAC to a smaller number, say 0.5, a dimension for a 1" line will display 1/2". If DIMLFAC is bigger than 1, say 2, a dimension for a 1" line will display 2".

Again, I'm expecting that this will help you more for troubleshooting than for practical applications, but it's here if you need it.

Dimension Across Viewports

For those of you who dimension & annotate in paper space, you might sometimes run into the scenario where the object you need to dimension crosses multiple viewports.

As an example, I’ve got a simple bar here, 1'”x20”. I’m showing one end in each of two viewports to condense the display.

When I try to add dimensions, snapping to the corners of the bar, the short end works great but the long dimension displays the paper space distance instead of the actual length.

How to fix this? I actually got the tip from somebody who attended Wednesday’s See the Suite Advantage virtual event. (Recordings are now available on-demand.)

The suggestion is to replace the default dimension text with a field referencing the length of the object instead. Now, normally I don’t advocate overriding dimension text, but when you’re replacing it with intelligent text, I’ll make an exception.

Here’s how it works:

1. Double-click the dimension text to edit it, right-click, and select Insert Field.

2. In the Field dialog, set the Category to Objects and select Object under “Field names.”

3. Next to “Object type” in the dialog, click the “Select Object” button.

4. Here’s where it gets a little sneaky—and I can’t show it in a screenshot. You’ll just have to trust me (or better yet, try it yourself).

Click on the object you want to dimension, even though its viewport isn’t active. I know, it’s weird. But it works, just like it does when you’re selecting objects to dimension from paper space.

5. Back in the Field dialog, pick the property you want to reference (probably Length) and set the format and precision.

6. Click OK, and that’s it! You’re back in the drawing with an intelligent dimension that still knows what it’s attached to.

Admittedly this takes a little more effort than regular old associative dimensions, but once you’re used to placing fields, I think you’ll find it goes pretty quickly.

Add your own words to the AutoCAD LT dictionary

You’re probably aware that AutoCAD LT has a built-in spell checker, accessible from the Annotate tab of the ribbon, with the SPELL command, or as you go with a dashed red line under misspelled words as seen below:

But wait a minute – that word isn’t misspelled! It’s a standard abbreviation. So what to do with it?

As always, you have more than one option. You could just ignore it. The red line only shows up in the editor, and it won’t print, so you could just leave it alone. Or you could right-click on the word and choose “Ignore all”. This turns off the red line temporarily, but it will be back. To get rid of it completely, choose “Add to dictionary” from the right-click menu.

(Anybody else entertained by the fact that “TYPO” is one of the suggested alternatives?)

This is great for adding words one at a time, but there’s also another way to manage your custom dictionary.

Start the SPELL command (from the command line or ribbon) and go to Dictionaries.

(Notice also that you have a choice of main dictionaries, in case you’re spell-checking drawings in different languages. They won’t help you with the actual translations, though.)

In this dialog, you can switch out custom dictionaries (maybe point to one you’ve got on your server), add or delete words from the list (nice of us to put “AutoCAD” in there, don’t you think?) and import other dictionary files.

By the way, a “dictionary file” is just a regular old text file with a CUS extension that contains the list of words you want to be considered as correctly spelled. Easy as pie to create, especially if you’ve already got a standard abbreviation list.

Stacked Fraction Options

I found today’s tip in the July edition of the excellent Michael’s Corner series—I’d never seen this particular option before, and I just love learning new things!

Let’s say you’ve got a stacked fraction in AutoCAD LT 2012:

But you want to modify it. So you highlight it—an obvious first step.

From here, the most obvious second step is to right-click and select “Stack Properties” from the shortcut menu.

But, as Michael discovered, if you left-click on the highlighted fraction, a small arrow appears at the bottom.

Click on that, and you see “Unstack” and “Stack Properties” right there.

From here, you can modify the stack properties or even access the AutoStack feature to control how future fractions are stacked.

Double-clicking on the fraction also brings up the Stack Properties dialog, and works in earlier versions of AutoCAD LT too.

Drag Text Into Drawing

Found this in the tip archives yesterday:

You can drag-and-drop a TXT file from Windows Explorer into a drawing file to insert its contents as an mtext object.

Convenient, eh?

Frame Leader Text

On Friday, I posted about the new ability to extend a multileader landing all the way to its text (instead of stopping at the bounding box). Today’s post is about the other tweak to multileaders.

If you like to draw a box around your leader text, you’ve probably seen the “frame text” option in the Multileader Style dialog.

But until now, you couldn’t control the spacing between the text and its frame. It was one-size-fits-all.

However, in AutoCAD LT 2012, the landing gap now controls that spacing. See the possibilities:

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