topic Re: Odd drawing note behaviour in Inventor Forum

Odd drawing note behaviour

NigelHay — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 14:18:07 GMT

We have a "Notes" drawing which contains standard notes and we copy & paste notes from this drawing into part drawings as needed.

One note has the lines strangely indented so that they don't align:-

However, when I copy & paste this note into a drawing, it all aligns perfectly:-

This is not a problem but I am curious to know why this happens, I have not noticed it with any other note. The note is written in the Inventor drawing text editor & the indents created by using a single ctrl+tab.

Inv2026, Win11.

Re: Odd drawing note behaviour

dan_inv09 — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 17:23:09 GMT

is there something different about ...

well, I was going to say the font but that isn't stored in the drawing

It could be something with your styles that changes from the notes drawing to the new drawings ...

What happens if you paste it somewhere else on the notes drawing?

(and how did someone get the indents correct if they are not on the drawing where the note was created? (or was it pasted there from somewhere else?) - how are the indents created, a bunch of spaces? (can you do something like Shift+Tab in the Inventor text dialog?))

Re: Odd drawing note behaviour

johnsonshiue — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 02:45:54 GMT

Hi! The behavioral model of a drawing text object in the drawing is quite subtle. The formatting can influence the output. The textbox size can also drive the text. I would make sure the text box is as wide as possible to avoid "double-override."

Please share and example file here. The forum experts can help take a look.

Many thanks!

Re: Odd drawing note behaviour

NigelHay — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 09:20:05 GMT

The font is the default Tahoma. We don't mess about with styles, just use defaults. Some of the drawings I have pasted the note into are quite old, have the styles change over the years?

The indents were created using ctrl+tab, if you look at this image, you can see that the note in the drawing has the uneven indents but, when I double click it to open the text box, the indents are even.

Re: Odd drawing note behaviour

NigelHay — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 09:32:22 GMT

Johnson, attached are 2 files. "300" is an old drawing which I have pasted the note into to show the odd behaviour. "Ceramic note" is a new drawing with the note pasted in correctly. For the moment, where the note displays oddly, I have opened it in the text editor & added 2x spaces at the front of the line that needs pushing back.

Re: Odd drawing note behaviour

johnsonshiue — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 22:43:19 GMT

Hi Nigel,

I believe this is a known limitation in the Inventor Text Editor. It lacks the ability to insert tabs, which makes multi-line text very hard to control. Unfortunately, I don't have a good solution at the moment.

Many thanks!

Re: Odd drawing note behaviour

dan_inv09 — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 23:49:17 GMT

The numbers are not the same width, if you've got 4 spaces after 11, note 33 might be just 2 spaces to get all the notes to line up - or more likely 2 1/4 spaces, and then 22 is 2 1/3 and so on, and multi-line notes ain't gonna look right at 6 spaces in any of those cases. They told us once that they were going to make it so we could have numbered or bulleted notes - I notice that hasn't been mentioned as a possible solution.

If I have time, I like to do my notes as a sketched symbol.

And then number in one note and put the text in another - that way all the text is lined up nice and neat.

It takes a couple more clicks with creating and editing in the symbol, and you have to manually fix the numbers if one or more of your notes has more lines added to it.

[One time I made a table and made the cell lines and the border with white lines (they didn't print even if they did show up very boldly on the manila screen) - and then I had the numbers centered vertically too. (I think that was a tabulated drawing rather than notes though.)]

Re: Odd drawing note behaviour

NigelHay — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 11:15:29 GMT

Johnson, OK, it sounds like I will have to live with it for now. The text editor does allow tabs using cntrl+tab, it still seems odd that it's OK in some drawing but not others.