AutoCAD® 2012 FOR DUMMIES®

Using the Same Old Line

Despite its limitations, the TEXT command is useful for labels and other short notes for which MTEXT would be overkill. The following procedure shows you how to add text to your drawing by using AutoCAD's TEXT command.

You can use TEXT for multiple lines of text: Just keep pressing Enter after you type each line of text, and TEXT puts the new line below the previous one. The problem with this approach is that TEXT creates each line of text as a separate object. If you want to add or remove words in those multiple lines later on, AutoCAD can't do any word-wrapping for you; you have to edit each line separately, cutting words from one line and adding them to the adjacent line.

The TEXT command doesn't use a dialog box, a fancy formatting toolbar, or a contextual Ribbon tab like the MTEXT command's In-Place Text Editor. You set options by typing them into the command line or the Dynamic Input tooltip.

Here's how you add text with the TEXT command:

1. Set an appropriate text style current, as described in the section “Simply stylish text,” earlier in this chapter.

   It's possible to set an already-created text style current at the TEXT command prompt, but it's usually more straightforward to set the style before starting the command.

   An alternative to opening ...