Adjusting M-Leaders and Text Positioning for Wood-Shaped Caps in CAD Software

Fine-tuning M-Leaders and Text Alignment in CAD Design.

Understanding the complexities of positioning text in a project can be a considerable task. This article delves into the nuances of working with M-leaders and adjusting text positioning, offering insightful tips and tricks to master these aspects.

Key Insights

  • The text positioning in a project is determined by its base insertion point and nodes where the text is snapped into place. These factors have a significant influence on the alignment and placement of the text.
  • M-leaders can be modified in terms of their scale factors and angled lines. The article suggests ways to adjust these elements to ensure optimal visibility of leaderheads.
  • The article highlights the importance of considering leader styles in project annotation. It demonstrates how to modify multileader styles and scale factors, and explains the implications of these changes on text size and dimension.

Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.

For this next part of the project, we're really going to be working on two things. We're going to be working on the M-leaders and the positioning of the text. Now, the thing to remember is that the text has a base insertion point, and there are these nodes where we want to have the text snap to.

And you can see that on an existing wood-shaped cap, it already aligns perfectly. It's slightly lower at the three-quarters. It's definitely lower at the two-and-a-half.

We know we're going to need to adjust the text. You can also see, looking at the M-leaders, that we have a couple of things going on. Either they're using different scale factors, or probably the angled line right here is not long enough for the leaderhead to be exposed.

So what we're going to do is we're going to just spend a couple of minutes and review this, look at where the nodes are, and look at how the horizontal components of the leaders want to go straight ahead. Because you can see, I don't have a whole lot of room up here to get an angle in. I see that I have a dimension node right here, and if that leader line were to slip right below the six-inch value, that I could get near the six-inch value without crossing it.

I can probably take this square picket, the leader, for there. I could maybe move it down to this node, which is over here, or up to this one. Again, it's not going to be crossing the one-foot-two.

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We can see, again, in a second we're going to explore what the scale factor is on the M-leader style, but what I'd like to do is to make this angled line long enough so that we can be sure that the leaderhead will show up. Again, here for stucco, I can probably keep it right about where it is. Tread, I definitely am going to need to have that longer, so the text might want to pop up here, so I have a longer angled line down here.

But then if I have tread here and stucco here, it's almost too close, so why not move stucco up to there? I'm just going to go move stucco from the insertion base point of the text to the node. I'll just say here, move tread from the insertion base point of the text to the node, and I'm going to go on and pop it up to there. That's fine, so we have stucco.

I'm going to move this text from the insertion base point of the text to the node. And again, I see I'm going to have the angled line. I see I'm going to have the one foot two.

I'm just going to try it here and see what happens. I'm going to move this from the insertion base point of the text to the node. I'm going to go on and pull it down one, and then we have one more down here.

Move the deck system from the insertion base point to the node, and I'll just pop it here. And then I'm also going to say, move crossing from the insertion. I'll just say from here to here, move crossing from insertion base point of the text to the node right here.

I'm going to move it up one more. Zoom extents and save. Okay, since the next thing we're going to do is to check in on the mLeader style, remember that we have dimensioning and we have leaders, and those are annotations.

If I go to the annotation, pull down here, click on the arrow, you can see that right now it's saying to use the standard multileader style. So I'm going to go down and choose manage multileader styles. I'm going to make mLeader 48 my current style for right now.

I'm going to modify it so you can see that my size is an eighth of an inch. You can see that it's choosing a spline. I want to use a straight leader, the colors by layer, line type, line weight by layer.

It's a closed fill arrowhead. It's an eighth of an inch. The leader structure is I have the points, landing distance.

I have my scale factor. I want to change it from 48 to 8. So I select that. I go to content.

Everything's fine there. The text will be a little bit smaller, 332nds. It matches the dimension, and I go okay.

Then I'm going to go to here, right button, rename. I will rename it to be a scale factor of 8, and I will set it as my current leader style and go close. If I now go up to leader, and it says from where, and I'm starting, look what it says up here, arrowhead location.

photo of Al Whitley

Al Whitley

AutoCAD and Blueprint Reading Instructor

Al was the Founder and CEO of VDCI | cadteacher for over 20 years. Al passed away in August of 2020. Al’s vision was for the advancement and employment of aspiring young professionals in the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industries.

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