I hope the image says it all:
I just want to precisely layout text in my blocks but it is difficult, because the justify grips are offset from the top and bottom of the text, so I always have to guess by using lots of zoom to get create a fake grip point I can use for moving the text exactly the way I want.
There must be a way of getting grips that are on the exact corners of the text. is there?
To understand the location of grips with text you need to understand text and how it is generated. This will explain why the characters sometimes go beyond what you are expecting.
Roman Charaters, Chinese characters, greek, Arabic etc all have different set outs. Roman Charaters are based on 4 lines to allow for uppercase, lowercase, hanging and extended characters.
Hanging characters for example are g,j,p,q,y, as they 'extend' below the 'line' characters which extend above the line are b,d,f,h,i,j,k,l,t, and natural characters are a,c,e,m,n,o,r,s,u,v,w,x,z.
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz ,{}[];|
Even with upper chase you get hanging as in the 'Q'.
There are thin characters i,l, or wide characters such as m.
The spacing is also tricky, based on character width.
So to explain where the grip is, take a bounding box around the extents of the largest character, include annotation and special characters for the font you has selected such as ',";% as they also extend above and below the three set out lines, and some are wider than the largest alpha characters....
and there you have it, the grip point!
@Anonymous wrote:
snap locations depend on justification
top left, top centre, top right,
Left, right, centre,
bottom left, bottom centre, bottom right..
... and don't forget Middle, Middle Left, Middle Center, Middle Right, Aligned, and Fit.
Some of them [the single-word ones] are not applicable to Mtext.
And some have a different effect depending on the exact character content of Text. In this image, note that Middle justification places the actual extent of the characters themselves centered around the insertion point [the grip in the middle of each], so that although their insertion points are at the same level [the red line], their baseline locations [the lower-left grip in each] vary in relation to that, affected by descenders, upper- vs. lower-case height, etc. But Middle Center justification has the mid-height of capital letters at the insertion point, and the baseline locations also aligned, and those variants in character height work from there, even for Text that contains no capital letters.
On the question about the O's in the image attached to Post 1 going below the baseline, that's a typographical convention for visual balance, that you will find is true of almost all fonts with "weight" [though typically not of AutoCAD .SHX fonts that are effectively drawn with linework]. The tops also bulge slightly past the text height. If they didn't, O's [and other curved-bottomed and curved-topped characters] would effectively look shorter than [for example] E's or N's. You can't make it not do that by way of grips or insertion points, but you could Move a piece of Text so that the bottom of its bounding box falls at a given vertical position, since the bounding box will "reach down" to include those bottomward bulges. But there would be no way of [for example] making the bottoms of all the letters in YES above line up, except by having the YE and the S as separate pieces of Text, and if you want the tops to line up, too, they'd also need to be of different heights.
