Adding Text to Title Block Design in AutoCAD: Step-by-Step Guide

We have our line work for the title block completed. Now what we need to do next is to begin putting in some text. And I'm going to start with the more complicated one first, which will be this area up here where we will have the client name, client address, and the client information.

If you look at your handout, you can see the client name, client address, city, state, zip are all texts that are a quarter of an inch high. The telephone number is an eighth of an inch high. We're going to be using the mtext command.

And please know that by default, the text is going to be going left and right. But we want to have our text going up and down. We're going to be needing to be aware of that.

Something else I'd like to bring to your attention is that in our template file, the default text value is six inches. When we begin this, you will start seeing some large text because that's going to be the default value of the text that's been brought in from the template file. So here's what I'm going to do.

I'm going to say mtext. I'm going to read the prompt. You can see how large it is.

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That's because, again, it's coming in from the template file. We're putting in our bounding box. And I'm always thinking in terms of top left and bottom right.

So my first corner will be the end of what will be the top left corner of the bounding box when I understand that I'm looking at it normally. So I will pick here. But let's look at the command prompt.

You see that there's an option for rotation. So I will do a right button. I will choose rotation.

And I will give it a value of 90 because 90 degrees is rotating it 90 degrees to the left. I choose enter. Now you can see looking at the command prompt, it's asking me for the other corner of the bounding box.

And so I'm going to be choosing right here. So there's my bounding box. Now you can see that my text is humongous, that the blinking I is my text.

So I'm just going to begin typing a few letters. So I will go CLI. And again, all I'm trying to do right now is to begin the text.

So I'm now going to do a control A to select the text. And I will give it a value of 0.25. So again, I clicked up here, typed in 0.25, and I chose enter. You can see that it has shrunk the text.

So I will continue, type in ENT for client, space bar, name. I hit ENTER, client address, enter, city, comma, state, space, space, zip, enter. Then I'm going to say telephone number.

The telephone number text is smaller, and so I will select the text. And I will give it a value height of 0.125 or an eighth of an inch. And so I'm going to hit ENTER to lock that in.

So what I've done so far is I began the text. I did a control A to select it all. I resized it.

I continued on down and kept working on through the process until I got to telephone number, selected it, and gave it a value of an eighth of an inch. So I've already told the text that my bounding box begins down here. It goes over to there.

You can see that by default the text justification is left. So I will select all the text. I will let the justification be middle center.

And when I'm done, I'm going to close the text editor. And you can see that now the text is in the bounding box. So control S to save.

I'm going to pan down and work on this one now. Now, I could always copy this text from up here down to here, but I'm going to give us some more practice. I'm going to say text.

You can see it's looking for the bounding box. Again, using the initial size that's set in the template file. And I can say the bounding box starts at the end of here.

I read the prompt. I need to look at rotation. Right button, rotation.

I type a value of 90. It's now asking for the other corner of the bounding box. I have my running O snap on, so I will choose over here on the right-hand side of that line.

You can see once again it's looking for the big text. So I'm just going to start off with project PRO. Control A. I'm going to select the height of a quarter of an inch because it remembers this from our having done it a few minutes ago.

Then I'll go to the right. Type in JECT for project name. Enter project address.

Enter city, state, zip. I will do Control A, or I'll just select it. I'll choose the justification as being middle center, and I'll close the text editor, and now we have that text there.

Control S to save. The last text that we want to put in is going to be down here in the bottom right. Now what we're going to do is we're going to put the text in, and then we're going to move it, but I want to show you something fun.

We know that all of this text is an eighth of an inch high. Look at the handout. You can see it's an eighth of an inch high.

If I choose text, you can see that what it's doing is it's, again, using the six-inch default value from the template file, but here's a workaround. If instead of choosing M text, if I choose the text option and choose single line text, if I arbitrarily say here's a start point, do you see that it's saying that the text height is six inches high? Look at the command prompt up here. It's saying the text height is six of an inch high.

So I'm going to say.125, enter, eighth of an inch, specify rotation angle of zero, enter to say I'm done. I'm just going to type ASDF, some characters, enter, enter. What I've now done is I have reset the default text value.

If I now go and erase this text, if I now zoom into this area, if I do M text, go to text, choose multi-line text, see how the text is smaller? If I say my first corner is the top left, my bottom right corner is down here, if I let my justification be top left by default, I can now type in, go in here, type in project, space NR, period, and I can close the text editor. I can now copy this text from here to there, to there, to there, to there, and down to here. I can double-click on this text.

I can highlight it, and I can type in date, colon, close it. Go back to project number. I'm just going to do a colon instead of the period.

Close it. Select this text. I'm going to type in drawn by, colon, close the text editor.

Select this text, checked by, colon, date, double-click here, date, colon, double-click here, sheet, number, colon, close the text, control S to save. Now I have all of this text properly aligned in the top left corner of each of their bounding boxes. But what I want to do is I want to move all of this text a sixteenth of an inch over and a sixteenth of an inch down.

Where this number is coming from is that the distance between the horizontal lines is a quarter of an inch. My text is an eighth of an inch high, so I want to move it down and over a sixteenth of an inch so I have some nice alignment. So I'm going to choose move, do a window, enter to say I'm done, pick an arbitrary base point at 1 over 16, comma, minus 1 over 16.

So look at my command prompt. I'm saying move the text from an arbitrary base point to a point at 1 sixteenth, comma, minus 1 sixteenth. I hit ENTER and you can see the text has now been moved down, control S to save.

The last thing I'd like to do is to put some text in over here which will be consistent information. So what's going on is this is the title block file, this is the TTLB file. The TTLB file is XREFed into all of our deliverable sheet files.

There's information on this drawing which is consistent across all of the sheets. This project will have the same project number. The sheets will have the same deliverable date.

They will be drawn by theoretically the same person, checked by theoretically the same person. They will have the same date. But you'll notice that I said theoretically.

So what's happening is I only want to have information that will definitely be consistent across all the sheets included as text within the title block file. So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to say copy.

I'm going to choose project number, date, and I'm going to choose this date here. Enter. Pick.

Go to the right and pick. I hit escape. You might have noticed a pause a second ago because I realized that I forgot to change this guy right here.

So I'm going to double click that and change it to say the word scale and close the text editor. I'm now going to choose this text, do a right button, go to properties. I'm going to take the text justification and change the justification from being top left to being top right.

Hit escape. I'm going to choose the date. Do a right button, properties.

It's there. Justification. I will make it top right.

And the scale over here, I'm going to choose this at least for right now. Go to properties and I will let its justification once again be top right. So I've now taken, and I've just hit escape a couple of times.

I've now taken these values and changed their justification to be top right. So what I want to do now is I want to move them over along this edge. So I'm going to say move the text.

I'm going to say I'm done. My base point will be my insertion point. I pick on the text.

Now, what's happening is you'll notice that if I pick on top of the text, that the insertion icon does not show up. So typically when you're moving text, you need to take your crosshairs, go down a little bit, and you'll see the icon over here. So from the insertion point, I'm going to say go perpendicular to this vertical line.

Hit escape, control S to save. I now want to move these values a sixteenth of an inch to the left. So I will say move.

I will choose these values, enter to say I'm done, arbitrary base point, drag my hand to the left, and type in one sixteenth of an inch, control S to save. What I'm now going to do is to populate this with the defined information. So I'm going to double click here.

The project number, I'm just going to type in the number 1234. So this would be our project number. The date, I'm just going to select here, and I'm going to type in today.

Close that. Now, what I've decided as we're working on this is that I really want to have attributes for the drawn by, the checked by, and the scale. So I'm going to delete that value right there.

So so far in this title block, we have the text. This is the information that is consistent across the project. We have all of this text, top left justification.

We have this top right justification, a sixteenth of an inch down, a sixteenth of an inch over. I need to also put a little bit more text in here for my revision information. Again, this is where I'm showing the revision dates, you know, when I have submitted stuff to the regulatory agency.

So I'm going to go back, make sure I'm in multi-line text, my bounding box from the top left to the bottom right. I'm going to type in the word revision, colon, enter, enter, and then one period, enter, two period, three, four, and I will say five. And I will close the text editor.

I'm now going to move this a sixteenth over and a sixteenth down. So I will say move, choose this, enter to say I'm done. I pick an arbitrary base point to a point at one sixteenth minus one sixteenth, enter.

So I've moved it over and down, control S to save, zoom extents. So what we've gotten done so far is we have our crop marks, we have the border, we have the text, and again, this is the TTLB file. This is the title block file that will be referenced into all of the drawings within the drawing set.

So this information, if we have to change the client name, if the client moves, if there's a different project name, then all we need to do is to come into this TTLB file and make those changes there. Again, what we're going to be doing in a few minutes when we get into our TBT ext file, which is our title block text file, is that we will be providing the attribute information for drawn by check by scale and the sheet number, because again, we're always going to have it say who drew it, who checked it, what the scale is, and the sheet number. That information will be present in all of the sheets, but the value is going to change.

So I'm going to zoom extents. I went Z enter, E enter, control S to save. I'm going to go back into my working drawing, reload the XRF, and you can see that that information has successfully shown up in the new file.

So this has been a long video. Please listen to this again as needed. It is a lot of fun, and what we're going to come back in a few minutes and do is to bring in our JPEG image for our project.