New Multileaders and Old Quickleaders

It's 3 in the afternoon and I just made a fresh pot of coffee, so I'm wide-awake and ready to roll through the rest of the day. This blog entry, like so many, comes from a problem one of our clients was having. Being the kind-hearted person that I am, I thought I'd be helpful to some unknown CAD operator out there and keep them from tearing their hair out in frustration. So here's my little tip about Leaders...

Last July, I wrote about the new Multileaders, one of the new features of 2008. I still think they're a huge improvement on the old Quickleaders, but there is a wrinkle I ought to have been aware of. When you use Multileaders, if the drawing is opened in an older version, the Multileaders become Proxy objects and might not be visible. ARRRGH!
So...
If you open it in AutoCAD 2007 and earlier versions, set PROXYSHOW to 1.
Here is a link to the official Autodesk solution - Take me to your Leader

This isn't exactly great news if you are collaborating on a project with someone who has 2007 (or even older!) AutoCAD products. What if they have to be able to edit these leader objects? You'll want to be able to insert the old style Quickleaders, right? I'm going to do a little review of how we create a custom toolbar using the Customizable User Interface, so we have a button for our leaders.
By the way, the old Quickleaders can be made to attach blocks, but that's a whole new subject.
For you real old-timers, excuse me, I mean for you very experienced CAD users - you can just type in QLEADER, and it will work like it used to. Quickleaders are visible and editable in older versions. If you're used to typing everything in anyhow, you can skip the rest of this entry. The rest is written for the new people who've just been learning this program, or for anyone who just doesn't feel comfy with the CUI.
Type in CUI, and you'll see the dialog box come up as in the picture here. For an example, I'll copy the dimension toolbar and customize it with the buttons I use the most, and add the Quickleader button on it.
First of all, expand the toolbars and find the Dimensions toolbar, right click on it and choose Copy. Then right-click on the Toolbar heading, and choose Paste. The 'copy of Dimensions' toolbar will show up at the bottom of the list. Click on it to choose it, and right-click to find "Rename". If you're sharp eyed, you'll notice that I forgot to do this step. Oh well...

When you click on the plus in front of the toolbar name, it opens up so you can see everything that is on there. To remove buttons that you seldom or never use, right-click (again with the right-clicking!) and choose 'Remove' from the list of options. It only removes the command from that toolbar, not anything else at all.

To find a command that you want to add to a toolbar, type in as much of the command as you know, and the commands that contain those letters will start being filtered in the list below it. The Quickleader command shows towards the bottom when I type in "leader". When you see the command you want, just drag it up onto the toolbar and place it where you want.

Now, whenever you make a new toolbar, it will appear in every workspace. The easiest way to get rid of it in workspaces where you don't want it is to stay in the CUI, click on each Workspace title in the upper left panel of the CUI, and notice that in the upper right panel you can see what toolbars, and ribbons, and so on, show up in that workspace. If you don't want this toolbar in your workspace full of ribbons, just right-click on it as I did in this illustration and remove it. It's easier to do it this way than to open each Workspace and delete it from there.

AND, you can just as easily add this or any other button to your existing ribbons, if you've become comfortable using them. You do all the steps as above, except you drag the command onto the proper Ribbon, and onto whichever row you want it to show up. Voilà! You just customized the new Ribbon, and it was a piece of cake!

Custom Multileader Style

Hello and welcome to the CAD Cafe. Unless you live high up in the mountains or right next to the sea, it's HOT where you are! So get yourself an iced drink - if your IT guy lets you have liquids near the computer - relax and try something new from AutoCAD 2008.

Today we're going to make a custom Multileader.

In case you aren't familiar with that phrase, let me explain. It's simply an arrow pointing at something you want people to notice, with a number that corresponds to a keynote, usually with a shape around it like a rectangle or a circle. There are a lot of them that come with AutoCAD, but maybe you want to use the same one you've always used. It's part of your company's signature drawing style! Still, wouldn't it be great to have the functionality offered with 2008 multileaders? You can!

This first illustration shows the different types of multileaders that are included with AutoCAD. I created a few different styles to show that you can use any arrowhead, line/spline, and shape combination you like. The process for creating these styles is exactly the same as for a custom Multileader, just choose one of the shapes from the block list.

First step: create a block if you don't already have a custom one. Draw your keynote & insert an attribute at the size you want your keynote to print out in paperspace. I used this ellipse at the size you see dimensioned here.

Important Note! Don't use an annotative text style for your attribute!
Another thing you might want to consider is creating all this in a template file you always use, so once you've gone to the trouble of creating it, the style is available to you.

Next, make your block but make sure it's NOT annotative. All the annotation happens in the Multileader style.

You'll want to make sure to Save at this point. AutoCAD won't put your block in the list if you haven't saved the drawing. Plus who wants to make the block over again just because they forgot to save?
Second step, use the button in your Dashboard to start the Multileader Styler command.

This is a lot like creating a dimension style, you choose options from each tab.

Reading from left to right; under the Leader format tab you choose either lines or splines, line color, linetype, lineweight, also arrowhead style & size. Next is Leader Structure where you can specify how many points your line will have, as well as a specific line angle if you need that. Here you'll choose how it's scaled - annotative or not, same as with dimension styles. As you choose things you'll see the preview of your multileader change.

The last tab, Content, is where you choose your own block.

Here is illustrated all the choices you have when you create your own Text Multileader Style. I was going to explain it all, but in this case a picture is definitely worth a thousand words, and those of you who aren't interested in this can just skip this picture, and you won't have to read a thousand more words!

Below is the Content tab with 'Block' chosen; you

can see all the choices that come with AutoCAD.

I clicked where you see the words "User block" highlighted, then a list of all the blocks in the drawing popped up and I chose my 'Custom Keynote' block.

Here you can see my preview, I chose my custom block, straight lines, annotative scale and all colors by layer.

Remember, if you want your Multileader to be Annotative, you make it annotative here in the Style Manager, on the Leader Structure tab, under 'Scale'. You don't use an annotative block, it won't work.

Guess who tried it? Right in one! So when I tell you it won't work, you can believe me.

Here are my custom Multileaders, inserted through the viewport and all scaled perfectly. I added more leaders to one of them to demonstrate that a custom block multileader style has all the functionality of the ones that come with AutoCAD.

I couldn't resist changing the layer colors per viewport, just so the electrical would stand out more in that second viewport. While in Paperspace, I clicked inside that viewport, opened the Layers Manager and changed the colors in the "VP Color" column. Here's a picture so you could see which ones I changed and how they're highlighted when you do change them.

I hope this was helpful - you can use the new Multileader functionality in 2008 and you don't have to give up any custom keynote blocks you're already using.

Keep cool until next time!