AutoCAD® 2012 FOR DUMMIES®

Bring Out Your Inner Leader

Don't worry; I'm not going to make you walk across a bed of red-hot coals or give you a sales pitch about office politics or personal growth opportunities! No, I'm talking about those notes with arrows that point to drawing objects that you need to embellish with some verbiage.

Multileaders — mleaders for short — are a vast improvement over old-style leaders available prior to AutoCAD 2008. In fact, they're so good, they should be running the United Nations! Mleaders, unlike the old-style leaders, are single objects. They are also able to point in multiple directions at once (just don't ask them which way is the bus station). Finally, multileaders — just like text, dimensions, hatching, and other objects you use to document your drawing — can be annotative.

There are two older-style leaders stored in AutoCAD's attic (Autodesk hates to throw anything away). These semi-retired leaders are no longer accessible on menus or toolbars, but they're still lurking up there waiting to . . . er, lead you astray. If you've become attached to typing commands, you may be inclined to type either LEADER or LE to create those pointy-headed thingies. If you do, be aware that LEADER runs the positively ancient command for creating notes-with-arrows. There are no options, so only straight leader lines and infinitely long text strings are what you get. LE (the alias for the ...