Problem customizing leader text note

[Anonymous]

After adding a leader text note to a drawing in Inventor 2012, the text line appears restricted to one single line without any way of modifying this. There must be a simple way to 'squeeze' down the text box attached to the leader line so the text is moved to suit space limitations ? This is very simply done in AutoCAD by just gripping the text box of the leader note and dragging it to the desired size. Thanks

[dan_inv09]

It would be nice if you could do it like that, wouldn't it?

I just copy the text out of the leader and put it in a regular note and adjust that text box - then I go back into the leader text and add carriage returns, then you delete the reference text, and when things change and you need to squeeze it tighter or you can't fit that many lines or whatever you've got to mess around again.

[Anonymous]

Many thanks for your tip on how to get round this, I would have expected this to be a basic 'given' as it's one of the most simple and essential daily operations when working with text and leaders. If you imagine that a simple drag of grips on a text box takes about 2 seconds to arrange the text as oppose to having to go about it in some round about way to 'get it to work this way' seems like madness to me - I sure do hope Autodesk address this issue in the next release, very surprised and disappointing that they have not included such an essential thing like this in Inventor. Thanks again.

[dan_inv09]

"I sure do hope Autodesk address this issue in the next release, very surprised and disappointing that they have not included such an essential thing like this in Inventor."

As you get more familiar with Inventor you will become more accustomed to saying that.

Inventor is not AutoCAD. When they started developing Inventor they brought in all new people (and I think they severely discipline any who come in contact with the AutoCAD people). Some people in business these days really love to discourage "we always did it that way" thinking - Autodesk took it to extremes. Any lessons learned through decades of AutoCAD development are going to have to be learned all over again, unfortunately for the users like us, probably in the same time frame – hopefully not longer.

[Anonymous]

Very interesting to read your comments about Inventor, I have been using it for about 8 months now having come from AutoCAD and as you say it is a whole new way of working.

You wrote "Some people in business these days really love to discourage "we always did it that way" thinking - Autodesk took it to extremes." - seems like the old adage 'If it's not broken don't fix it' is ringing true here, I've encountered many horrible niggles in Inventor that AutoCAD deals with is the most simplistic ways and makes me wonder why such things were altered, changed or not included at all in Inventor, my original post of the 'text box' issue being a good example.

[dan_inv09]

Yes, you have to learn to stop thinking, "Why did they change it?" They didn't change anything they started from a blank slate.

And as far as "If it ain't broke" - that just means they haven't gotten around to it. There's a lot of change for the sake of change - when they could be fixing things they are messing around with things that worked. Don't get me started on icons.

Several months ago someone from Autodesk started a thread here looking for feedback on a proposed change - after a couple of "That's okay the way it is, why are you thinking of changing it?" posts, and a whole bunch of "Why are you messing with that when you could be fixing A.) ..., B.) ..., C.) ..., etc. ?" the thread suddenly disappeared.

[michaelfeinstein]

Has this been submitted as a feature request?  Having only used Inventor for a short time coming from Acad and Revit I too would think this basic text formatting feature would be available.  Reminds me a bit of acad pre-mtext...