A Little Text Thing

Hi all! Great weather we're still having, eh? Especially all of you poor folks back east!

I wanted to add a couple tiny tips about text, one new for 2009, the other is old but you may not know about it.

In this picture I have an Mtext object, I just made it on Friday when I was showing someone how fields work. There is some text I typed and a Date field, formatted so that every time I saved the drawing, he could see the seconds update, to show just how cool these fields are!
Cool as North Dakota in the wintertime! And you could say that North Dakota is one Big field!
Of course, you could say the same thing about eastern Colorado, or Kansas, or Nebraska, etc, etc.

Today, I double clicked on the text and started to change it. I wanted the note to be different, and I didn't want the field to update any more. One of the new features of the AutoCAD 2009 ribbon is when you're in the text editor, the ribbon automatically changes to a text editing ribbon. If you don't pay attention you might not even notice it.

In the picture you'll also notice that I have Spell-check ON, it's blue. When I misspelled a word, now the Text Editor underlines the word in red, just like most word processing software now. Also, if you right-click exactly on that underlined word, a list of possible words you might have meant to type is there in your right-click menu. (another reason to start using right-click menus!) I purposely misspelled "created" as "creatid" and it gave me "created" which was exactly what I wanted, plus a few other odd words. If the automatic spell-check bothers you, just click the spell-check button to turn it off.

But please, for your own sake, do a spell check before you send any drawings out! It's such a simple thing to do, and you look the opposite of intelligent when you send out documents with misspelled words in them. I'm sure I've done that here in this blog, and I'm sure you've noticed it! Spelling errors stand out!

The next thing I did in the text editor is select the Date field, and right-click. The old thing I meant to tell you about is that you can change a field into text.

If you used a field to get information from an object - or in this case, a certain date - and you don't want it to keep updating, right-click on the field and choose "Convert field to text". That is exactly what it does, so now you have text where there once was a field. You can edit all or part of it just like any other bit of text.





I hope someone, somewhere said "I never knew you could do that!" Maybe someone who is outstanding in their field, even.