AutoCADderFriday, January 08, 2010
Textual complex linetypes on the fly
A very useful utility appeared today on CAD Forum. The LTFly tool creates linetypes (dashed lines with texts) as you go.
Imagine you need to create a series of lines labeled "LINE1" to "LINE9" or pipe lines labeled "D30" to "D300". You can label the lines separetely with masked texts or you can create manually the encoded .LIN files with linetype definitions and load the text linetypes in your drawing. With LTFly I was able to just type the text and the linetypes were created automatically. This can be a real time saver in some situations.
Imagine you need to create a series of lines labeled "LINE1" to "LINE9" or pipe lines labeled "D30" to "D300". You can label the lines separetely with masked texts or you can create manually the encoded .LIN files with linetype definitions and load the text linetypes in your drawing. With LTFly I was able to just type the text and the linetypes were created automatically. This can be a real time saver in some situations.
Labels: AutoCAD, linetype, text
Monday, August 17, 2009
AutoCAD integrated with Google Translate
The Budweiser blog refers about an updated Xanadu tool "TRANS" that translates drawing texts to another language.
The manual translation is quite standard, although more useful in most situations.
What I like much more is the automatic translation mode of this tool. It integrates AutoCAD with the online tool "Google Translate". This integration is a quick way to automatically translate large portion of drawing texts to another language. You should be able to use it with any language pair supported by Google Translate.
See:
Translate texts in AutoCAD drawings
The manual translation is quite standard, although more useful in most situations.
What I like much more is the automatic translation mode of this tool. It integrates AutoCAD with the online tool "Google Translate". This integration is a quick way to automatically translate large portion of drawing texts to another language. You should be able to use it with any language pair supported by Google Translate.
See:
Translate texts in AutoCAD drawings
Labels: AutoCAD, text, translation
Tuesday, October 09, 2007
Special characters in AutoCAD
In many drawings, AutoCAD users need to enter texts with special characters like mathematic symbols, letters from greek alphabet, cyrillic, punctuation characters, indices, or just accented characters from other languages.
With the Unicode support in Windows and AutoCAD it is quite easy to enter such characters - either using Windows language support for that particular language (and a local keyboard driver), or by copying the character from the CharMap.exe Windows application (Character Map). Alternatively, you can enter any Unicode character using the \U+nnnn text code.
But for all of this you will need first of all a text font containing a full set of Unicode characters, called "glyphs". AutoCAD ships with a couple of fonts - both SHX and TTF containing the Unicode set. For these special characters you can use e.g. TXT.SHX, SIMPLEX.SHX, or the TrueType font ISOCPEUR. From the Windows standard font set you can use e.g. Arial. If you have MS Office installed, you can use the font "Arial Unicode MS" - it contains one of the largest character subsets of Unicode 2.1 (its TTF file is a whooping 24MB). Try to make sure that the referenced font is available on all target computers used for the respective DWG drawing.
With the Unicode support, AutoCAD offers a very flexible and portable multilanguage text functionality.
With the Unicode support in Windows and AutoCAD it is quite easy to enter such characters - either using Windows language support for that particular language (and a local keyboard driver), or by copying the character from the CharMap.exe Windows application (Character Map). Alternatively, you can enter any Unicode character using the \U+nnnn text code.
But for all of this you will need first of all a text font containing a full set of Unicode characters, called "glyphs". AutoCAD ships with a couple of fonts - both SHX and TTF containing the Unicode set. For these special characters you can use e.g. TXT.SHX, SIMPLEX.SHX, or the TrueType font ISOCPEUR. From the Windows standard font set you can use e.g. Arial. If you have MS Office installed, you can use the font "Arial Unicode MS" - it contains one of the largest character subsets of Unicode 2.1 (its TTF file is a whooping 24MB). Try to make sure that the referenced font is available on all target computers used for the respective DWG drawing.
With the Unicode support, AutoCAD offers a very flexible and portable multilanguage text functionality.
Labels: AutoCAD, DWG, font, SHX, text, TrueType, Unicode
Monday, March 05, 2007
AutoCAD 2008 - your new DTP application
Not that AutoCAD will replace FrameMaker or that it will become the typesetting tool for your local newspaper, but - the new function set of the MText editor is quite impressive in AutoCAD 2008.
Especially the column formatting seems to be powerful enough to typeset any column text, including freeflowing newspaper-like columns, with hard column breaks, gutter settings and individual text-alignment in each column. Column text can be controlled either by defining numeric parameters or interactively by grips.
See the lorem-ipsum sample text reflowed into dynamic columns with individually specified height and individual text-alignment. Note the fully justified text in all columns - distributed spacing is used in the left two columns and standard soft spaces are used for aligning in the right two columns.
Especially the column formatting seems to be powerful enough to typeset any column text, including freeflowing newspaper-like columns, with hard column breaks, gutter settings and individual text-alignment in each column. Column text can be controlled either by defining numeric parameters or interactively by grips.
See the lorem-ipsum sample text reflowed into dynamic columns with individually specified height and individual text-alignment. Note the fully justified text in all columns - distributed spacing is used in the left two columns and standard soft spaces are used for aligning in the right two columns.
Labels: AutoCAD 2008, text
