Mtext… Now w/ more variety (& fewer calories).

 AutoCAD 2015 has enhanced its Mext capabilities in this release. Here are some of the latest features.

Display
The first thing that you will notice is that the back of the text box is transparent (when you have hardware acceleration ON) making it easier to see the available area on your AutoCAD drawing area to avoid excessive corrections afterwards. They have also made the text box resizable by width and height by passing the cursor over the edges and using the sizing arrows. Using the corner sizing arrows will allow you to be able to have more control over adjusting the sizes of columns.

Paragraph tabs

You can now use the Paragraph tabs by picking inside the ruler and access the paragraph settings by right-clicking on the ruler or using the original diagonal arrow in the corner of the Paragraph panel in the Text Editor tab.

Auto Bullets and Numbering

Auto Bullets and Numbering feature was added to Mtext. If the “Allow Auto Bullets and Numbering” setting is checked in the drop-down list on the Ribbon menu; Then as you type in the text box it will automatically be applied to the text string if the line begins with a number, symbol or letter that is follow by one of these characters  “. ) > } , or ]” along with a space or a tab afterwards. Pressing the backspace after the space or tab key will remove the Auto Bullets and numbering if you are not wanting a bullet or number. You can also control this feature by using the lightning bolt.

Caps Lock auto-switching

This feature recognizes if your Caps Lock is on when using the shift and automatically corrects the issue and turns the Caps Lock off once you hit the spacebar or enter key, allowing you to keep typing without having to change it yourself or having to go back and make corrections afterwards.

Superscript and Subscript

The Text Editor tab on the Ribbon now has Superscript and Subscript buttons. Just highlight the Mtext portion you want changed and click the appropriate button to apply or remove.

Autostacking

Fractions entered in the text box will trigger the Autostack feature and display the lightning bolt icon where you can click on it and choose different options on how you want your fraction to display. Use the Stack Properties to modify existing fractions or set the default display style in the Autostack Properties.

Match Properties

The Match Properties button has been added to the Text Editor ribbon, allowing it to always be available during all of your Mtext editing. Remember: Mtext is used in most annotating commands: Mtext, Mleaders, Dimension, Tables… so this make it easy to match properties on all of these objects.

Aligning Text

Lastly, and my favorite…  The new Text Align (TEXTALIGN) command works just like the MLEADERALIGN command, but on regular Mtext objects. This makes lining up all selected Mtext in a drawing super-fast to make clean professional looking drawings. You can line them up by pick other Mtext objects to align with or by picking points to make an alignment line. There are also several spacing options that you can choose from.

I hope you were able to learn some new tricks with AutoCAD 2015 text enhancements, and I look forward to spreading “A Word on AutoCAD” and well as my new Blog for AutoCAD users moving to Revit in our “A Word on BIM” section called…  “Bippity Boppity BIM!”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 14th, 2014 at 10:53 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.