Subtitles of the Movie

We're now going to look at defining attributes in our drawing now, attributes can be applied to the drawing itself, they can be applied to objects that are going to be converted into blocks, such as our Drawing TITLEBLOCK. Now what we can do here is we can place a piece of text in our drawing. So let's go to our Layer Pull-Down here and have a look at what layers we do have. We don't actually have a TEXT Layer as such so let's set up a TEXT Layer first of all. We go to our Layer Properties Manager as we did previously, we want a new layer and the new layer is going to be text. Now to be consistent, again, we're going to set that to the red, now it's already red because TITLETEXT was our current layer and its adopted the properties of that TITLETEXT Layer. So we don't need to worry about the color of the layer or the line type in this particular case. I can just press Enter and our TEXT Layer is there. If I double click here on this little piece of paper it makes text the current layer, ready for me to put some text on the drawing. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to Close the Properties Palette and I'm going to place a piece of Single Line Text on the drawing, just to say that this is the office. Now we have to make sure that the text is the right height to be seen, you'll notice on our TITLEBLOCK over here we cannot see the text. That's because its too small for this particular office here, we need to make it bigger. So I'm going to make the text 300 millimeters high, if I then scale that by say a scale of 1 to 100 in a Viewport it'll show up as 3 millimeters high on the TITLEBLOCK when we set up the Viewports. I'm going to set up a new text style, so again I go to Annotate and this time I'm going to click on the Text Style Manager and I'm going to set up a new Text Style and I'm going to call it Text underscore and I'm going to set it up as 300 millimeters and then underscore again and I'm going to put in Model. As per our previous conventions, only this time it will be 300 millimeters high in the Model space. I click on OK, there's 300 millimeter Model. What I'm going to do this time is I'm going to set the heights to 0. That means that AutoCAD will ask me for the text height when I put it into the drawing. I apply that, I set it as the current Text Style and I Close. Now when I place my Single Line text, like I did previously, there's Single Line Text there on the Text Panel of the Annotate Tab. It'll ask me for Stop Point of the text, I'm just going to drop this into the drawing at the moment, we'll move it around later. So I left click for Start Point and it gives me the default left justification, specifies the previous height that I used, in this case I want it to be 300, like so, press Enter. It then asks for the rotation angle, again I'm going to accept 0. As you can see now I now get a 300 high cursor. So if I type the word Office, there's my text letting me know that its an office. If I press Enter once it prompts me for another line text, if I press Enter again it closes out. Now if I click on that Text I can move it around. Now that's great, that tells me its an office but what I can do is I can actually add an Attribute to this drawing which will actually prompt me if I make a change to change the Attribute, rather then me having to edit the text. Attributes are also intelligent; I can suck Attributes out of a drawing using Attribute Extraction as well. So I might have office details applied to this drawing. So what I might do there is I might change my Text Style slightly. So I'm going to go in and Edit my 300 millimeter model, I'm going to right click here and rename and change it to 150. So I want it 150 millimeters high like so, notice the height there is currently 0 and I'm going to change that 150 so it's fixed because I want it to be 150 millimeters high. OK. I'm going to apply that and I'm going to set it as current and I'm going to Close. Notice this stayed the same, if I click on it now though and then go down here and select my 150 it updates to 150 high. So when I change the Text Style and then go in and apply that Text Style to some text you'll see it changes. Let's have an Attribute instead. How do I define an Attribute? Well what I do is I need to apply my Attribute Definition. So if I now go to Tools here, I'm looking now for Attribute Definition, now it's not available on this particular panel here, OK. What I do is it's on the Menu Browser or is it? Notice I've got two options, like before, lots of options in AutoCAD. If I go to Draw and look down the list here for Block and click, I can define Attributes now on the Menu Browser or on the Blocks & References tab there are Attributes available as well. So here I have Define Attributes, so I'm going to Define an Attributes and notice the Attributes use Text Styles. So I've got Title, 10 millimeter layout, notes 5 millimeter layout and so on. What I'm going to do is I'm going to use Text 150 millimeter model and my tag here is going to be Room Name and the prompt for this Attribute will actually be Room Name, question mark. The Room Name Question Mark is what will appear on the screen. The default I'm going to put Office 1 like so, that's the default that will appear, justification will be left just like my text and what I can do now, Insertion Point, I can specify that on the screen and what I want there is I want a Attribute applied to this particular drawing as well. So when I click on OK I have my Room Name Attribute as well and I'll place that just underneath like so, OK. Now what'll happen is if I ever convert that office there to a Block and take that Attribute with it that Room name Attribute can be updated at anytime and associated with that Block. We'll look at that later on. I'm going to save that and leave it in the drawing at the moment. What I'm now going to do is Zoom in on my TITLEBLOCK here just using my mouse I roll up on the wheel to zoom in and press down on the wheel to pan or I can use the Zoom Commands available to me here on the Utilities Panel and the Home tab on the Ribbon. So if I click there I could have done a Zoom Window for example which would have put it around there like so and that would have zoomed me in as well. I can use any of those Zoom Commands to get in and out of the drawing. Now company name limited is a fixed piece of text, we're going to leave that as a piece of Single Line Text. But the one thing we do need to do is we need to put the project name in on this particular Drawing TITLEBLOCK. So we're going to add an Attribute, so again we go to Blocks & References tab and we define an Attribute. So I'm going to click on Define Attributes and the Attribute this time is going to be project, like so. The prompt will be Project Name and again a question mark and default I'm going to put in something like Project 1, obviously that will change. Justification though I need to change, I don't want it left this time, I want it right so I'll ask for the right hand position for the Attribute Text and what we're going to do is we're going to have a what they call a Verify. Now a Verify option will prompt me twice to make sure that the Attribute Value is correct when I insert the Block into the drawing. Insertion Point, I'm going to specify on the screen, text I notice its already adapted to 150 because that's fixed. I don't want the 150, I want it my note, I want it the size of my Title here, note notes but Title, that one there. Therefore it's 10 millimeters high on the TITLEBLOCK. I click on OK and notice start point there, if I go and highlight that Node Snap I need to switch O-Snap on here first, there's my Node Snap there, left click and it automatically justifies it to the right because I selected a right justification. Now that TITLEBLOCK is ready to be drawn into the layout tabs and made into an AutoCAD Block. Now what we'll do there is we'll use it over and over again for the drawing son this project. Now we'll make it into a Block later in another exercise, but at the moment as you can see we've applied an Attribute there to a TITLEBLOCK, if I now do a Zoom Extents as well, you can see that we've applied an Attribute as well here to our room name for our office.