Text with Character - AutoCAD 2012 - page 286

1. Determine the drawing scale factor.
If you set up the drawing, you should know its drawing scale, as described in
Chapter 4. If someone else set up the drawing, and is still around, ask that person!
Other methods of figuring out a drawing's scale factor include searching
the drawing for a bar scale or a text note that indicates the drawing scale, or if a
printout is available, measuring dimensioned distances on the hard copy with an ar-
chitectural or engineering scale. Finally, if the drawing dimensions are in model
space, you can check the value of the DIMSCALE variable (the system variable that
controls dimension scale), as described in Chapter 14.
2. Determine the height that your notes should appear when you plot the drawing
to scale.
See the preceding “Plotted text height” section for suggestions.
3. Multiply the numbers that you figured out in Steps 1 and 2.
After you know the AutoCAD text height, you can use it to define the height of a text
style or of an individual text object.
If you assign a nonzero height to a text style (Step 8 in the “Get in style” section, earlier
in this chapter), all text that you create with that style will use the fixed height. If you
leave the text style's height set to 0 , AutoCAD asks you for the text height when you
draw single-line text objects.
This discussion of text height assumes that you're adding non-annotative text
in model space. In addition to annotative text in model space, there's a third al-
ternative. You can add annotative or non-annotative text to a paper space layout
— for example, when you draw text in a title block or add a set of sheet notes that
doesn't directly relate to the model space geometry. When you create text in pa-
per space, you specify the actual, plotted paper height instead of the scaled-up
height.
One line or two?
For historical reasons (namely, because the AutoCAD text capabilities used to be much
more primitive than they are now), AutoCAD offers two different kinds of text objects