Introduction to Annotation Objects: AutoCAD LT 2017 WEBINAR | AutoCAD

well good morning good afternoon good evening wherever you happen to be groovy guys groovy gals Autodesk folk all over wherever you're attending from my name is Zach Travis I am with Autodesk technical support and we are presenting another build your AutoCAD IQ webinar here brought to you my product support and with me today is micro tot oh he'll be presenting half of the presentation and I'll do the backend along with us for Q&A purposes isn't him on he's one of our expert elites and knows that quite a bit about the program so he's a good guy to have along for the ride this is us here again nothing new if you've attended ating this back-to-basics webinars with us before usual cast of characters and those are our details in the slide deck we'll be up along with the video if you can't get enough all right before we get started as usual the questions are in the interface for the webinar so as we go along feel free to ask anything you want naman will try to field them I'll try to field them when I'm not presenting and Mike will do the same when he's not presenting as we finish up here you'll you'll get a survey and all that good stuff so if you have any kind of feedback good bad indifferent whatever we need it we use it and we certainly appreciate any feedback we can get from you on these things so coming up in our webinar series just want to highlight the next four weeks of presentations in the webinars we've got working with styles in AutoCAD 2017 and that's next week with Volker I believe that there's going to be some overlap between what we cover today and what Volker is going to cover during that one but while we may not get in too deep on it he's going to get very deep on it and vice-versa so there are some things we might cover that he doesn't cover so not a bad idea to check them both out then on the 11th we've got the third dimension doing some really cool stuff they're covering 3d printing with AutoCAD and autodesk print studio i think they're talking about putting together some 3d modeling and they're actually printing it out so they may have some photos and video to show with that i'm not sure what they have in store but it's certain to be cool coming up on august 18th the tips and tricks that one's to be determined it's a mystery at this point still brewing up something I'm sure it'll be very cool so we'll update the schedule as we go so by next week I imagine Volker will probably have that to show you in the schedule coming up and if finally at the end of the month the August 25th about a month from now is myself and Mike again will be doing some basic plotting topics in AutoCAD not OCAD LT again the back to basics series that we cover here is mostly going to be focused on the AutoCAD LT product because everything that exists in LT also exists in full AutoCAD so we didn't want to go the other route and be exclusionary and leave some things out so again the our links here all this all these things you see here community forums are always out there it's a great source and a sometimes underutilized resource people don't realize just how knowledgeable the community is in the forums people have been using the products since way before I've been working here and Mike and everybody else probably put together there's some people out there because AutoCAD is a very mature product as you all well know and it's another way of saying it's really old but just means that there's been a lot of changes throughout the years and a lot of good folks out there in the and the forums run on their own blogs working for the resellers and our other partners so get out there check that stuff out there's login information to be had out there let's try that there we go so this week the topic is annotation we're going to cover textiles text objects and text objects dimension objects and finally leaders and M leaders and that's the majority of your annotations now what are annotation objects I mean the what does it mean inherently just means that it's information add it to the drawing geometry so without it we just have a bunch of lines and circles and arcs and polylines and whatnot we didn't know necessarily sure we could recognize the shape of a house or whatever we happen to be drawing but without adding text and dimensions leaders and M leaders notes here and there we'd be lacking some some additional information that that can be thrown in and it's invaluable so it's it's important to know how to use these tools and again as I always say these webinars should be not viewed as any kind of a substitute for proper training that you can get from our our partners our resellers the double is training centers some really really great instructors out there and some really good material these webinars are more just a presentation and overview of the tools within the products and maybe cover some things that you didn't know maybe you've taken training already and maybe they miss some of things we cover and certainly vice versa because we don't get into every little nook and cranny of the program but we try to cover things that we think will be helpful to you and working these commands and functionalities into your daily workflows because that's what it's all about getting things done so let's take a look at AutoCAD and see how this all works at this point I'm going to hand things over to Mike and he'll take it for awhile awesome that's thanks tuck alright let me present my monitor here alrighty so that match mentioned annotation objects they include dimensions notes and any other type of explanatory symbols or objects are commonly used to add information to your drawings so what we're going to be doing is demonstrating some of the most commonly used annotation tools unfortunately we won't have time to go over all of them because frankly we could probably do an entire webinar on annotation scales if we really wanted to go wild so without any further ado let's get right to it so here we have AutoCAD LT open I have a drawing open in the background you're going to see a tab up here for annotate this kind of gives you your annotation tools first up it's going to be text text is one of the most important components when it comes to annotating text style is really where you can customize the look and feel of your text and it's actually going to make its way into some of the other annotation objects so it's kind of where it all starts going in here this first box up here is where you can actually manage your text styles from drawing already include some of them open up the text style window so you can get a feel of what this looks like if you wanted to create your own text style one thing to note like I mentioned this whole this drawing already has some text styles in there if you're working at a big company or firm a lot of times you'll be working off templates so your template would probably already include a lot of these textiles in there but yeah if you wanted to kind of go in there and make your own I'll be showing you just how to do that so right up here on the Left you'll see a list of all the textiles that you have if you wanted to see the styles that are currently being used in the drawing you have that option down here let's go ahead and create a new one so once you've you know created the new textile you have quite a few options to play around with first foremost you have font if I were to drop down here you'll see that you have a big list of fonts that you can go through you'll notice that the symbol on all of them aren't the same so you have this TT symbol and then you also have a compass symbol that's because there's two main fonts that AutoCAD uses you'll have your your TrueType font which is kind of your Windows operating system font installed directly on your operating system let me just go to one of the most commonly used ones the Times New Roman or Comic Sans that's that's going to be or your true type font you'll also notice that there's this dot sh x extension for the fonts that have the little compass on there so the dot sh x font is used by autocad you know it's not installed on your Windows operating system but you could go online and find these different sh x fonts it's the limit AutoCAD and then use them in your drawings you might be wondering where you could actually get you know where these sh x files are living let me close out of here for a minute let's save the changes I don't have to create that webinar one again going to go the options right here so it should be listed under a support file search path right over here so this is kind of where AutoCAD goes to look for your fonts by default just to show you that I'm not lying let's go and look for them so it's Program Files Autodesk so this one is looking for LT 2017 let me find that font folder there you go so all those sh x file of font files that we were looking at this is where they live so if you wanted to additional fonts download them off the web grab them from wherever you end up getting these fonts and drop them off into this area over here and it'll be able to populate within AutoCAD and you'll be able to use those fonts so yep that's where they live what you can also do is add a new support file search path if you don't have your fonts in here so if you have like a network drive location that will have your fonts you could - AutoCAD to go look for the fonts in there but this is just kind of a default when you install your AutoCAD software all right let's go back to the textile window I'm going to go back to this webinar font that we've been working with you're going to notice down here they use big font option this use big font option is only available when you're using the shx font type so let me just demonstrate when you do the TrueType that option doesn't come available to you basically what it is it's an additional font type that lets you add special symbols in there so this becomes really useful if you're you know trying to produce plans and like Japanese or Mandarin that use special characters outside of the regular alphabet that we're you know accustomed to I personally don't use that too much but that option is available to you if you would like it to be if you were to use your standard to type you can fit it around with the font style you can make it bold italic regular for this one I'm just going to use the Times New Roman just to kind of make it a little bit easier to see next up you can play around with the size I'm not going to check off this annotate of because Zack is going to be touching up on that a little bit later but here you can actually set the height of your text what I would suggest doing however is leaving this at zero because later on if you were to set your height over here like I mentioned you know if your text style ends up being using your other annotation objects if you set this to something other than zero you'll be locking yourself into that text height so if I were to put this at 2 and I go into my dimension styles and try to create a new dimension style I won't be able to move that from - so suggest leaving it at 0 just make your life a little bit easier you're not banging your head against keyboard later trying to figure out why you can't change height I'll try to point this out a little bit later when we're going over dimensions but just keep that one in mind so down here you have some additional effects so you can play with you kind of see over here on the left and make a text upside down you can make it backwards if you really don't want anybody to read it you can change the width factor make your touch really wide if you wanted to that's really what there you go change the oblique angle so yeah there's quite a few things you can play around with in here right for now I'm just going to leave it Times New Roman regular keep everything pretty standard apply this guy so that is the textile that we're using right now so with your textiles I'll set some of the basic things you can do is just make some text or M text and I start off with just a regular text line it's going to be huge it ended up being ridiculously big the reason being that up here this is where the text height shows up so let me do that once more see how that is 8 you know 881 that's why it was so big so no switch this guy over I can't switch it yeah so here such that guy there try that once more and then shouldn't be as big doesn't want to behave now but if your text ends up being too too big what you can just do select it go to properties and switch the height so it's a little being a little bit finicky right now but and got it to be the size that we want to do additionally you can make em text so multi-line text let's do build your AutoCAD IQ ended up being big again but with your mtext you could actually make multi-line text note this guy over here so over here I have two single line of text at my multi-line text down here you have some additional options with when playing around with your text you could do a spell check you can align your text if I wanted to align these two guys I can and then down here is really just scale which again Zack will be showing you when we get to the annotations young portion of this webinar so what we have our Tech's ll set and move on over to dimensions so for dimensions you know your model requires dimensional information to define the size and position of the design you could add dimensional from information to specify the length diameter rotation angle geometric elements in the model as you can probably imagine this is pretty important to helping others understand your design so kind of similar to the text style window you'll have the option over here to manage your dimension styles similar to before you'll have a list of all the styles that are currently in your drawing and then you can go through it select all styles or styles in use for this one I'm just going to use all styles I want to see all the styles that are in here you can go ahead and create a new one like I had mentioned earlier a lot of times this is already set up in the template for you but if you wanted to go in and create your own just select new I'm going to create new one you could give it kind of a template so you're not starting completely from scratch you could also specify what kind of dimensions you want to use for I'm just going to use all dimensions and then I get this dimension style window so in here you'll have a bunch of different options for you know changing the look and the feel of your dimensions so these dimension Styles really help you establish your standards it's kind of important that you have a consistent look and feel so you're not changing up what your dimensions look at every single turn also if you're submitting plants the state they typically end up having some sort of up standard dimension style that you should hear to you can really play around with just about anything in this dimension style it's pretty cool because you could actually see it see some of the changes live over here on the right so if I wanted to change the color more than able more than happy to be able to do that you could really go wild and make your dimensions look however you want them to you could even you know delete some of the extension lines you can also delete some of the dimension line to make them really confusing if you want to go for that look play around with the symbols and the arrows you can change the size of your arrows you know there's just a ton of customization that you can do in here and it all really comes down to what you know what are the standards what do you need to have your dimensions look like and if you're doing this for fun you could just make them whatever you want them to look like so going over here to text this is what I was mentioning before so the reason that those text styles are so important is because you end up using them later on so this is the webinar one that we created earlier you're going to notice that the numbers did change to reflect that now our font is Times New Roman go ahead and change the color if you would like so this text height over here was what I was mentioning before since we set it to zero we could go in and change it to whatever we want now we have that option available to us but if we would have put this at another value in the text style it would be grayed out similar to how you see this fraction height scale grayed out that's what would have happened here so that's why I would recommend leaving that text height at zero when creating your text style so you have the freedom to change that later on in the rest of your annotation objects so moving right along there's a bunch of other options to change how your dimensions look you could change the alignment this also lets you play around with the fitment so you know in this situation situation where you're dealing with very little dimensions and your numbers just aren't going to fit you could figure out you know tell it hey I want you to do this when you run into that situation I want you to place it besides the dimension when that happens you really do get a lot of customization in here you also have the option of choosing your units so you can go to architectural if you want to switch my background is in engineering so this is what I'm most comfortable with so you could also have alternate units so if you want engineering units and architectural units you could have them display directly underneath you could also play around with where they're going to show up and then you also have tolerances so I don't use them too much but you have the option to you know add deviations add limits and you know play around with that so as you can probably tell there's a bunch of different things that you can play around with in here and just edit your dimension styles to your heart's content so let's go with this basic one you're going to see that populated up here and select the layer that you want the dimensions to come in with I'm just going to leave it as use current when it comes to actually placing your dimensions you have quite a few options available to you you can make linearly aligned angular it kind of depends on the situation because not all your dimensions are going to run into the same situation you know it's not always going to be that same situation sometimes sometimes you're going to want to know the dimer the radii of circular objects you're going to want to know the arc lengths you're going to sometimes want to you know give different dimensions for lines or distances so you play around with all this stuff in here you also have the jog option so it kind of just you can see it down there it just creates a little jog for your dimension you also have the ordinate option down here the ordinate option it'll if if you look at the picture in there basically what ends up happening is if you're showing dimensions you know I want a circle maybe one foot from my start point and then if you end up having a mistake at each interval you'll end up with something you know super super off at the end of your design so you can kind of measure the distance from the origin as it's kind of shown and explained in there but yeah there's a bunch of different ways that you can place dimensions in here or take a demonstration I'm going to create one here so there's one dimension so that's kind of like the you know typical way of putting a dimension in but there's also other options in there if you wanted to say I'm feeling a little lazy today I want to just have AutoCAD do it for me you could select that quick dimension and Abbott kind of do it for you since we never really told AutoCAD what to do with these weirdly placed dimension you know the fitment issues over here it kind of just mushes it in there but if we wanted to play around with that look we could go in to dimension style and edit that you also have your baseline or the continuous option over here so baseline kind of goes back to that ordinate you know ordinate option you have your base point and then you could measure the length of different points to that original origin point you could also do continue which is kind of what it did over here it'll just continue making your dimensions let me do this let's say I want to knee this guy there so instead of having to go in and individually do it one by one by one you could use that that tool you might you have requests to do the quick dim one more time because it's you're really a nifty thing and yeah it happens so fast when you do it it's it is an aptly named command yeah it is a very aptly named command because it is because it is very quick so yep you just use the quick dim so you can click up here or you could use Q di m and then you just select the Jim on a dimension really so once I selected it I just pressed spacebar or enter and it gives me the option to create my dimensions so I could do that let me press spacebar to repeat the command select all these guys once more and there you go I don't have to go in there and do them individually one by one so yeah that's I hope that that's helpful but it really is just a very very quick way to do your dimensioning just have AutoCAD do it for you up here you'll have some additional formatting things that you can play around with you could add you know little jog lines or just spacing you can make breaks so if you were doing you know a command or a dimension and it is overlapping over something and you're drawing you could create a break and make it so that it's has a little space and it doesn't look you know like it's overlapping one of the really cool things that I like doing and it actually save somebody or save me a lot of time there is an update command over here so if you say let's edit let's say I don't want to use this webinar anyone anymore kind of change my mind that's not what I want it to look like or website screwed up Adam it the the style I need to adhere to the correct standards let me switch it over you switch over to another dimension style if you do update switch make make the dimension style the one that you want the current one click update over here you can select dimensions that have been created and update them to whatever the current dimension style is so that's a pretty nifty command if you ended up yes growing up to the dimension style and you don't want to go in and do the one by one I'll demonstrate that again so I'm going to switch them back to my webinar ones click all these guys and there you go I switched it back but I personally like some more color so I'm going to go and update them again so that's a you know really nifty tool that you can use down here you end up with some more formatting options so back to those tolerances you could add them in you also get that oblique option could change the text angle so if you don't want them to be linear like this you could edit it to change the angle of the dimension you could change how they're justified and then you could also override so if you decide that you want to change some stuff in there you could override your dimension style and make the edits that you want so you know that's a very quick overview of dimensions and dimension styles so now I'm going to toss it back to Zack who's going to go over liters and some annotation scaling indeed and yes indeed that's a it is a quick overview and and bokor will be presenting Styles next week and getting a little bit more in depth with them so you want to be sure to check that out that is the beyond the basics so it's meant to be a little bit more in-depth so at this point I'm going to go into cover last bit of annotations which are that they haven't been covered yet which are I mean arguably you could count tables I suppose but where that's another webinar into itself really so we're going to wrap this up with the leaders cue leaders same thing what are they have you heard of a cue leader and M leaders but before I get too far ahead of myself again I was reminded that I neglected to do everybody's favorite part at the webinar that's to do a few polls ray all right I can hear your rejoicing out there in your offices wherever you happen to be so let's just do a couple quick polls here and then we'll go back into content we just want to get a feel for where y'all are and your levels of experience and whatnot so is this your first Autodesk help webinar we like to see the folks of course but we hope that we'll have new folks every time as well and looks like we're just getting about to the end of this guy here and it looks like we're about 80 percent tallied so let's let's close that one up and I'll share the results with you there so looks like the vast majority are return customers next we want to know what you primarily use as your main AutoCAD tool out of the list here and if it's other you know go ahead mark other if you don't use AutoCAD at all if it's 3ds max or whatever you happen to be and you just curious about AutoCAD and attending this that's fine too absolutely everybody's welcome here so we want to tailor the content that we present in these back to basics for for the folks out there and you know like I said before there's nothing in LT that isn't in any of the other AutoCAD and AutoCAD verticals like electrical and MEP and map and civil so all this information should be helpful in that and all these commands and variables exist in those applications as well so let's close this out give you a quick look at what that all came out at and there's a switch a lot of times we get a mostly LT but looks like in this time it's reversed on us for AutoCAD so that's good let's do a couple of more now that we've seen text and dimensions like to get a feel for how you're using that part of the program out there you may be in an office where everything's really tightened down and the standards are the standards and you just use the dimension styles that are in the templates as they're given to you or you might be a little more free to do whatever you need to do and change the dimension styles it may it may depend on the client they may have certain requirements of how things are supposed to look in the in the plans you've drawn up for them so that can certainly change and vary so all right not going to let this one go nearly as long as this one out take a quick look at that looks like the majority are doing a mixture thereof styles there are standards and then also ones that you create yourselves which is great and then lastly before we move in to the back of the content just a quick query about annotate of scaling in your annotations in your M text and your leaders and leaders your tables your hatches any at all so we'll we'll get into annotation scaling here right at the very end and again we could probably do a whole hour on just annotation scaling and how it works and all the ins and outs but we'll try to give you a a good overview of it in here so you can investigate more and there are some links in the PowerPoint as well the slide deck we're going to put up that are very good at explaining what it is there's a link to a video from lynda.com that I think is one of the best videos that I've seen on annotation scaling and it's from a couple years ago but really the feature hasn't changed much since then so so that's fine so let's close this out we'll share this and there's a fairly decent amount of percentage folks out there that at this point aren't familiar with annotation scaling so that's what we're here to do we're hoping to introduce you to that and let you know that it can potentially save you some time and effort as you go through your workday there all right so we've got one more poll at the very end we'll catch after we wrap up but at this point I will get out of that and restore that and we'll get back into the program here and we'll talk about leaders and M leaders now a leader in general sense is a it's a line or a spline that has some kind of an arrowhead indicator on one end doesn't have to be an arrow can be a dot could be a hash could be a whatever and then at the other end you've either got multi-line text or or or a block that indicates what the leader is pointing to and we'll go over what these look like here so both the endpoint the text the M text the block the arrowhead that's all customizable the point of a leader object is to you know just like Lenny's other annotation objects is to annotate one or more objects where you know in cases where placing text directly next to the object would be not feasible maybe there's not enough room maybe there are a bunch of things jammed together and putting text in there really close up just wouldn't work that's where leaders are handy you come in and we'll take a look and see what these look like so quite a few years ago now we introduced M leaders which are multi leaders and they've they've really become the de facto standard in the product but Q leaders and and regular leader objects are still there and we'll cover both of them here so we'll take a look so let's let's begin by just drawing an M leader and we can do that let's go to the annotate ribbon tab and let's just make a multi leader so we specify the landing point you can lock in these angles but I usually leave it free so I can place it wherever I like and then once you do that then it's going to prompt you to put in some annotation text so we could say say here is an M liter and since it allows us to do multi-line text we can take advantage of that and then we click to get out of it and there is our M liter now the cool thing about an M later is that it's it's a multi-line text object in this case along with this leader line in an arrowhead they're all blocked together they're not a block really but they have certainly hallmarks of a block in that you've got different types of objects all grouped together for a common purpose now you can extend the length of the landing line with this grip here in the middle and then this grip up here where the text is and this grip here where the stretch point is you can also move those around and I'll show you what that looks like say we wanted to move it over here everything comes with and you see what happened there is after we went past the center point it flipped over to being docked to the left side and you can control that through the through the M leader styles what behavior happens when you move things around you can also use the grip that's near the M text object as well to drag things around the same way now contrast the regular leader object let's just do a quick leader it gives you the same kinds of prompts you specify your start point let's say over here next point next point and then it's if you look at the command line it's asking us if we want an annotation or if we want to specify yet another point let's do another point and another point and another point and we could go on indefinitely adding points here because there's no restriction on how many because leaders like M leaders aren't governed really by a style if anything they get there they take their cues from the current dimension style so at this point let's let's just hit enter to put in an annotation say here is a leader and this is the second line so much like the regular M leader a leader is a little more basic you can you can grab the grip closest to the text move it around and it tends not to let's see I think I might have there we are there it goes so there's only the only the grip here at the very end the M text location that's the only group you can use to drag around and have the line follow along with you if you if you instead grab the leader portion of it and grab the grip points there it just it just moved those around now queue leaders is a is an extension of the leader command and what a queue leader does a queue leader adds some other abilities and primarily you can go into settings there if you just hit ask there it'll take you into a queue leader settings dialog it's got some cool things in here that you can do the one that's really I'm going to point out here is this annotation reuse if you start with reuse next what that means is that the next annotation you create it's going to then as a tooltip shows there it's going to then use that for all subsequent leaders so we'll see what that looks like so let's make a liter here and in this case I left it for copy object so it's going to prompt me now I've got this object this block here that I made I'm going to choose that as you can see it placed it on the end of my leader so now if I look in queue leader again and I go back to settings now the dot is you switch to reuse content instead of reuse next because it's already gathered the next thing which was the W block that I added there the block that has a W not a W block can be confused there so if we do a queue leader now and we start somewhere it's going to automatically place that same block at the end and the same would be the case if I had used text instead of choosing an object and that is the kind of nifty thing too with the queue leaders is that you can set it for object and each time you place one if you're not setting for reuse if you leave it to none you can say copy an object so each time that you draw a liter object you will prompt you to copy an object now it's a little misleading can't just be any old object as you can see here can be an M text could be a tolerance it could be a block it can't be a line or a circle or a hatch or any other type of objects so it's a little misleading it just says copy an object here I was going to give a demonstration of putting a hatch on the end of a leader but you can't quite do that so so by and large you know in local most instances you're going to be using M leaders these days but there are some instances where the queue leader thing gives you some options you you can't do necessarily with an Emily one thing you can do with an M liter though that you can't do with the others is you can add lines and I'll show you what that looks like here if you right-click the M liter we can add a liter and it'll keep prompting you until you hit Enter to stop it so now we've got many liters coming off this one annotation here so if you had say you know maybe you wanted to point out all the windows or all the screw heads or something you could put a liter a multi liter to any and all of them and by the same token you can select the thing right click it and you can remove leaders too you don't have to it's very very customizable exactly I just come on hey um Matthews asking can you redo this of the multi pointed leader that you just did sure absolutely this guy over here I'm assuming is the one we're talking about let's get rid of that yep okay so I'll show you just real quickly here a contrast a cue leader if you go into the settings has a setting here for leader line and format words has a maximum number of points set and when you reach that maximum number of points and includes the initial point it's then going to prompt you for the annotation okay so that's why if I did a cue leader here and I went click click click now it's prompting me for the annotation or it's asking me for the copy of the object to put is the annotation so it's also I've got one two three points because that's what's specified and cue layer if by contrast if I just do just leader just the command leader and I start my leader I can click and click and click and click and click and click and click as many points as I want to and then when I'm ready to put in the annotation you see it the prompt there it's asking me do I want annotation I'll just press ENTER and then that will lead me to put in the leader here exactly have a question actually can you access the leader settings once more the shore great thanks mm-hmm yep so the regular leader command doesn't give you these options but queue leader does now when you're done making a queue leader which is this guy over here I that I made you see in properties it tells us it's a leader and if I select this one that I made using just the regular leader command it's also a leader but using the queue leader gives you a few more controllable options it was a it was a step towards what eventually ended up where we have M leaders and you have all kinds of control and M leaders they have their own styles which you'll define here and if you want to modify an M leader style you've got things like you know how many leader points can I have similar to what we had in queue leader that's where they that's where they got that maximum leader points it looks just like that line the content you want it to be M text you want to be a block or deal on no content at the end of your M leader what's your is it going to be straight is it going to be a spline or is it going to be none you might have just an arrow on one head on one end and the text and no line in between it's it's very very modifiable very customizable so that's how leaders work how M leaders work again you can pick and choose what you want to use the majority of time we see drawings coming from customers most people at this point I've switched over to M meters and as you see it up here and leaders palette there really isn't a way if you hover over this it says M leader if you hover over this it says M leader there really isn't a way other than command line and maybe toolbars to make regular leaders and queue leader but it's good to know that they're there and and they'll probably remain in the product indefinitely I mentioned like many other things that people got used to because just when you think something's been obsoleted you try to take it out of the program and people scream bloody murder that you've taken my favorite Pro command away from the program and I used it for 20 years and it happens a lot so we try not to do that so lastly and very quickly I'm going to give short shrift to annotate of scaling here but we'll try cover it here so I'm going to show you two comparison drawings here and for the most part I'm AI did my best to make them look identical so a non annotate of drawing here is an example I've got a model it's the same old house drawing and and on the model at various points I've drawn dimensions for various dimension distances as you can see down in my layout tabs here I've got one that's a paper size of 36 by 48 and another that's a paper size of 11 by 17 now in both cases I want my text to come out to be a half-inch when I lay ruler to paper I want to measure this text height as a half-inch so I've done that here and if you were to plot these out that's what you would get now in order to accomplish that though since I'm not using annotate of scaling I will show you my dim styles here and in order to accomplish what I've done here I had to use four different dimension styles to get things the way that I want them because my viewports are scaled differently and I'll show you what I mean here we'll look at properties will pick this first viewport here it's scaled at a half inch equals a foot this next one over here because it's showing a different part of the detail it's scaled at 3/32 equals a foot and this bottom one here its eighth inch equals a foot and even still I think on this one I did quarter inch equals a foot so for every different viewport scale you have if you want to you have your text come out the same height physically on the paper when you plot it out or in PDF if you're making PDFs you have to use different dimensions styles and that's why for each viewport I've got four viewports in this drawing I end up having four different dimension styles and the difference between them is they're fit factors so if we take a look at this and this is a little bit of what my kid showed earlier if we look at the fit we're using an overall scale factor to make the text come out the height we want it to be 96 for example is the one for the eighth inch and you get that by just multiplying 8 by 12 if we look at the half inch let's look at the fit for it it's set for 24 and again that's 2 times 12 that's how we're coming up with these numbers here so let's go over then to an annotated before I leave the non annotate of drawing I want to point out that this 300 here is used in two different places I've got it here and I've also got it here on my 36 by 48 now if I were to measure these they're a little bit different height because they are the same dimension so I can't show them exactly the same text height in two different viewports that have different scales if I'm using non annotated dimensioning so if I go over to my annotate of drawing now let's take a look looks the same we look at this one this one's the same now the reason this looks so small is because keep in mind this is the 36 by 48 inch piece of paper if we zoom in here and if we were to print this out you this text would indeed come out to be 0.5 and I'll show you what my DIMM style looks like here I'm only using 1 instead of 4 and I'm text eye 2.5 so that's why everything's coming out 0.5 so on this 36 by 48 inch piece of paper this text height is half-inch and on my 11 by 17 they look bigger comparatively because it's a smaller piece of paper but it's also half-inch size text when you lay the ruler around the paper now to accomplish this you've got to be wary of a couple of things there are when you are on your model and you go to draw dimensions or text or any other annotated object for that matter there is this scale adjustment down here that adjusts your annotation scale and I'll show you what that does if we change it to quarter each equals over eighth inch equals a foot for example you see the size of the text differently now if we go back to a layout though it hasn't changed anything because I only change the annotation scale on the model tab and similarly if I'm on a viewport and I change the viewports annotation scale let's say I change it to well let's just do 8 inches equals a foot here okay every changes size because we change scale in the viewport but if I print this out again my text is going to be maintained at a half inch real paper height and that's the goal here to add flexibility because maybe you don't always know what scale you're going to need for your viewports or maybe your model is too big and maybe you do need to try out different scales to fit on the piece of paper and that's where annotation scaling comes in really really nicely because you can maintain it all one annotation scale or one dimension style rather that's annotated and there are a couple of variables that control things this annal this button down here you see on the right it adds scales to your annotated objects whenever the annotation scale changes so and I'll show you what I mean by that if I take a look at this you can see all the different representations for all the different annotations scales that are maintained in this object and if I look over here in my properties palette these are all the different scales and the weight reason they got added is because this blue icon down here was set up to do so so if I change my view port to an annotation scale that isn't in this list what will happen let's say 1 to 10 for example isn't in this list ok if I pick my viewport and I change my annotation scale to be 1 to 10 if I then pick my dimension object which is hard to see at this point it now has been added this one to ten annotation scale to its list and all other annotation objects are the same way all other annotation objects will have picked up this new annotation scale just by the virtue of me changing to it in my viewport properties now this show annotation objects always is the other key one down here and again there will be more at the end of the PowerPoint slide deck so we're probably going to run out of time here but if you don't have this one blue then what that means is that any annotation object that doesn't contain this current scale annotation scale of your viewport that annotation object won't be shown so for example if I I'll show you what that means here if we deselect the option to automatically add a new scale anytime we change and we unclick this here let's change to a an annotation scale that isn't present in my dimension for example let's do let's do 1 2 16 ok so there it is now you notice this is where the dimension was it's missing now it's not displayed because this only says show annotation objects at current scale but it's not selected now if we pick this there it is so sometimes you'll be working and you might think hey what happened to my dimensions take a look at this guy down here and make sure that it's not turned off because if it is it may be hiding some of your dimensions and other i annotate of objects from you because they don't contain the current viewports annotation scale there's a lot to cover again annotation scaling could probably take up its own full hour long presentation anyway I'm sure we will at some point but I wanted to give you just the glossy overview here again if you look at the the video once we post it up and go through a little more slowly I'll sound a little like this probably when you play it at half speed and of course that'll even sound or so it sound like quarter speed now but it may make sense for you a little better to grasp as you go through it because I have been just kind of blowing through this here so annotation scaling it's good it takes a little bit more thinking ahead on the front end but as we've seen in a comparison between these two drawings you know it can really save you from having to maintain several dimension styles and that's not even to talk about text styles because dimensions aren't the only kind of annotation objects we have and you can see how it quickly could spiral out of control with trying to maintain all of your styles so annotated scaling really when it came along with the 2008 version of AutoCAD really really helped us out as far as lightening the load and keeping track of all these different styles to make sense of your annotation objects so hopefully that wasn't too fast again the videos will be up there have a look at it go through it I'm sure we'll touch on these subjects again maybe we'll do a whole hour and some time on just annotation scaling because certainly there's enough content in there that warrant a full hour but at this point we're at the top of the hour so before we go I do want to run one more poll and we'll pop this out here real quick and if you could give us the feedback that'd be fantastic as always at the end we asked if you've learned anything at all and we hope that you do looks like we got mostly s's here a few jaded professionals out there and never learn anything from us and they never will but we thank you for attending anyway so I'll close this out give you the quick results there of the poll all right as always for attending these you're the reason we do them we hope we can help you out we expose you some new features in the program to help you do your work a little more efficiently if you need training get training there's all kinds of good stuff out there from our reseller partners that doubles training centers autodesk.com slash training will get you in touch with all that until next time till the end of end of the month we will see it and enjoy

Channel: AutoCAD

Views: 31,723

Keywords: autocad, autodesk, autocad lt, autocad lt 2017, autocad lt 2017 tutorial, autocad lt annotations, autocad annotation objects, autocad lt 2017 webinar, autocad webinar, autocad lt webinar, annotation objects, build your autocad iq, autocad back to basics, animation, 3d, software, cad, 2d animation, tool, tutorial, how to, simulation, 3d modeling, autocad tutorial, cad design, modeling tutorial, autocad 2d, drafting, computer animation, auto cad, 3d animation programs

Id: HlACKn-TKwU

Length: 60min 52sec (3652 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 28 2016