Wednesday, May 18, 2005

AutoCAD 2006 - Solution when editing rotated text

I got this question: "The new TEXT and MTEXT editor in 2006 is great. Problem is I sometimes have to edit text on its side or even upside down. Gets very confusing to edit in this way. Is there some way of changing this new feature so I don't break my neck every time I edit a non-horizontal piece of text? I have tried MTEXTED set to OLDEDITOR but this only works for MTEXT and not TEXT."

There is a new system variable named DTEXTED that specifies the user interface for editing single-line text using the DDEDIT command. When set to 0 DDEDIT displays the In-Place Text Editor. When set to 1 DDEDIT displays the Edit Text dialog box.

MTEXTED can as said be used to get the old version of the mtext editor by setting the value to oldeditor. There is also the alternative to set it to :lisped. This will show a dialog box if the mtext has less than 80 characters. The default editor is used when the value is set to internal.

The new WYSIWYG editor that AutoCAD 2006 introduces is really good for many users but if you have a lot of rotated text it can be problematic. One solution is to use the Properties palette to edit the text content even though it's quite restricted. Another is to use MTEXTED and DTEXTED.

You can also create a button on a toolbar or a tool on the tool palette that runs a custom command.
A simple macro could look like this:
^C^C(setvar "DTEXTED" 1) DDEDIT \;(setvar "DTEXTED" 0);
In that case you can double click on the text if it's readable and if it's too rotated just click on the button or the tool.

A more automated way would be to redefine the DDEDIT command so it shows a dialog box depending on the rotation of the text in relation to the screen. I leave that for you to experiment with.

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