Annotative text, help explain

[sideshow-bev]

(At risk of looking dumb) I’m learning about annotative text and it seems to be way more complicated then it needs to be, which is usually a sign that I am not understanding something about it. Can someone help explain why you have to set up and assign every single scale you want the text to be in? As opposed to just setting the paperspace scale you want, and then Autocad automatically scales your text based on whatever scale your viewport is set at. I’ve read some tutorials and watched some videos, but I haven’t seen anything that covers this topic.

Additionally, it seems like this feature could be used across the board, like with dimensions, mleaders, objects, blocks, etc.

What am I missing? Please enlighten me AutoCAD junkies 😀😀 I'm sure there's features or setting that I'm not aware of.

[Jason.Piercey]

You may want to look at the ANNOAUTOSCALE system variable.

[pendean]

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@sideshow-bev wrote:

What am I missing?...

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Annotative Text/dimstyles/blocks/mleaders/tables/hatches etc. are for those users that rarely if ever add those items in paperspace separate from the content of viewports.

So... If you only ever add text/dimensions/notations/mleaders in paperspace above viewports, this 'annotative' feature is not for you.

Which camp are you? Realistically, you can't be in both all the time, it's a wasted effort.

[sideshow-bev]

@pendean I don't mean to place the text/dimension/mleaders, etc in paperspace. I just mean you set it up to be the scale it would appear in paperspace if it were in fact in paperspace. For example, if you have text would be .1 in paperspace, and you want a viewport at 300 scale, then the text would be 30 in modelspace. Then you want to add a 50 scale viewport, and it would automatically set the annotative scale to 5, etc. so you don't have to manually add those scales. Hope this makes sense. It's hard to explain.

[pendean]

Greetings @sideshow-bev 

Instead of spinning your wheels with all that math and theorizing, do this (see screenshot), then just experiment with viewports scales (and print to paper often from paperspace, you need to see to understand what it is you are doing)

For the general text size, most AutoCAD users have settled on 3/32" or 10mm as a final print size. Smaller or Larger has it's place too (like labels etc.).

Happy Cadding.

[dmfrazier]

"Can someone help explain why you have to set up and assign every single scale you want the text to be in? As opposed to just setting the paperspace scale you want, and then Autocad automatically scales your text based on whatever scale your viewport is set at."

For what it's worth, I (think I) understand what you mean. If AutoCAD can figure out which of the several scales to "activate" from among those you've added to your annotative objects when the viewport scale happens to match one of those, then why can't it just do whatever the scale is, regardless of which you've assigned?

I don't know the answer (for certain), but I suspect that it has to do with the fact that the scaled representations of the object (text, block, etc.) must be stored in the object itself. It's not a simple matter of the viewport "scaling" the object. If the viewport scale can be (literally) anything, then the block would have to have an infinite number of representations for an infinite number of scales. I'm not certain of much, but I'm pretty sure that is not possible.