Aligning Multileaders in AutoCAD: Annotating with Precision

Let's add some multiliters to this drawing. I'm gonna go to my Annotate tab, just to confirm that I have the MLiter 48 turned on, and I do.

Then I'll go to the Home tab and choose my A text layer. You might often see multiliters on an A text layer or an A-N-O text layer, A-N-N-O. That stands for annotation.

You can see that we only really have multiliters on the right and left elevations on our stucco. So let's start there. I'll zoom in on my left elevation, and this is a fairly simple multiliter.

It's gonna come out to the right, and we'll type stucco on exterior walls. So here's my liter. I'll pick this point here, drag out.

I'm gonna turn on polar. Polar, and my angle for polar is currently 15. I'm gonna change that to 30.

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Dragging out to the right and click to place. Enter to say I'm done placing my liter points, and this is going to be stucco on exterior walls. Again, I'm not gonna hit ENTER to break these lines up.

I'm gonna drag the M text box out. There we go. Close text editor.

That looks pretty good. Now I'm gonna do a copy with base point to move this to the other view. Select the object, edit, copy with base point.

The base point can be anywhere on the drawing, but because I wanna match it up exactly with this hatch, I wanna choose an object here that's on the other view. We've used this point in the past. Why not use it again? Click, and now it's copied.

This is the left elevation. Let's switch from view to the right elevation. Control V to paste, and here's my base point.

All right. Now let's go to the back elevation and try that again. I'll go to the back.

And in this case, we can see that our multi-liters are all on this side of the drawing, and some of them have nice angles to them. And you'll notice that those angles are either totally flat, horizontal, or a 60-degree angle. Now they can be 60-degree up or 60-degree down, but there's always a 60-degree angle.

That's something that you can add into your drawings to make it very, very clean and clear, and people will appreciate that type of precision. Okay, so I'm gonna go back to the Annotate tab, Multi-Liter. Let's start up here at the top.

Click, and I'll click the edge of the roof line just for my second point. Enter to lock it in. Composition Shingles.

Again, I'm gonna drag that box to make it two lines, and Close Text Editor. Okay, let's add this two-by-six fascia board. Again, that's this board here.

So I'm gonna go Multi-Liter. This time, I'm gonna click on the middle of the rectangle, right here. Moving up at that 60-degree angle, click to place my first point.

Come across, and I'll use perpendicular on the edge of the roof to place my second point. And this is two lowercase X six, two-by-six fascia. Close Text Editor.

There we go. Now I wanna add my stucco on exterior walls again. Well, I could paste, right? This is in my clipboard.

But how do I align these then? Well, let's try it. Let's paste and click. There's my text.

There's my leader. But how can I line these up? Well, remember, we can use with tracking, or we can move by limiting our X, Y, or Z angles. Let's see what that looks like.

I'm gonna Move, Home tab, Move, picking my leader, Enter to lock it in. Now, I'm gonna move it from this point right here. And that's a point that will line up with that point in the end.

But I'm gonna do the Shift-Right-Click, Point Filter,.X. That's going to say, if I click this point, that the stucco can only move up and down using that as my X dimension. I'll click to place wherever I want. And we can see that these are now aligned.

I can see that with my mouse. Let's do that one more time. I'm gonna select my object, Move.

The base point will be a point that matches up here. And I'll use the back of the leader arrow. Shift-Right-Click, Point Filters,.X, right there.

Now, it can only move up and down. That X is locked in. And I'll pick to place it right here.

All right, the last one we wanna do is that Finish Grade. So, Leader. This time, I'm doing Shift-Right-Click, Nearest, to choose that red line.

I'll pick right here. Again, I'm coming up at a 60 degree angle. Click.

Come over and place on Perpendicular. But in this case, I wanna actually choose the edge of the roof. That's what I was using for these.

So, I'll choose Shift-Right-Click, Point Filters,.X of the roof. Now, I'm locked in. And I'll click horizontally.

And this is Finish Grade. Close Text Editor. There we go.

That's one way to align leaders and multi-leaders. Control-S to save. Let's go over to the other elevation, our front elevation.

View, Front. And let's check out another way to do multi-leaders. In this case, I'm gonna draw these rather quickly and not very accurately, okay? So, I'll go Leader.

Here, straight across. I'll click there. Enter.

Composition Shingles. Again, I'll drag that box, okay? And another leader. I'm gonna make sure I get my good 60 degree angle anyway.

I'll make this one a little extra short. This one's going to be two, lowercase X, six, fascia. Okay? Then my stucco on exterior walls.

I'll make this one a little extra long. So, I'll draw it from scratch. Click.

I'll make it very long, I guess. Stucco on exterior walls. There we go.

And this one, I'll try to get as good as I can. So, I'll go nearest. I'll choose my pointfilter. X of the roof.

Come across horizontally. And this is Finish Grade. Okay.

Now I've drawn these multileaders. And I'll let you catch up if you need to. Go ahead and pause the video.

But once we're at this point, these are clearly out of line. How do we get these multileaders all in the same plane, or all in the same alignment? We could go in and manually try to move these around by clicking on their grips. And eventually, we could get them in place.

But I wanna use a different tool. I wanna use Multileader Alignment. It's a multileader tool.

Let's go to the Annotate tab. Here we can see it. It's a blue line and two multileaders.

And if we hover, it'll say Align. Go ahead and click it. And you can see that it says in the command prompt, Select Multileaders.

So, I'll pick my four multileaders. Hit ENTER to say I'm done picking multileaders. Now it says, Select the multileader to align to.

That basically means, which one is in the right place? Which one do we want to align to? Well, the finish grade here is the one I put extra effort into placing. So, I'll choose Finish Grade. And now we can see the multileaders are doing something a little wonky.

They're trying to align that back point to a singular line that I draw. So, I'll turn on Ortho with F8. Draw a vertical line.

You can see my dashed orange line. When I click, it will line up all of those back-end points of each of these arrows to match the line that I drew. There we go.

Let's go to the View tab. Switch to my left view. Zoom Extents and Control S to save.

In the next video, we will double check our elevations to make sure that we haven't missed any geometry. And then we will create our elevation sheets. See you there.