Add keynotes to your drawings and understand why they're often used instead of on drawing notes or call-outs. This article explains the process of creating keynote legends and placing keynotes on floor plans, roof plans, and front elevations using AutoCAD.
Key Insights
- Keynotes serve the same purpose as call-outs, but instead of adding text all around the drawing area, they use numbers or a combination of numbers and letters to identify what each note is for. A keynote legend is then created to outline what each keynote points to.
- In many professional environments, keynotes are numbered sequentially for each drawing; however, not every number may be used in certain cases. This article walks through the process of using every number while adding keynotes to drawings.
- The use of keynotes can vary from office to office, but this article specifically describes the process in the context of the CAD 301 plan model in AutoCAD, including how to create different legends using different file types and how to use the multileader command to insert a keynote.
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In this video, we are going to start adding keynotes to our drawings. In this case, I want to start by talking about what keynotes are and why we'll use them instead of on drawing notes or call-outs, and how they go alongside something like general notes. In our CAD 201 course, we use call-outs on all of our views, floor plans and elevations, and the roof plan to identify certain things in the drawing.
Keynotes do the same thing, but instead of adding a lot of text all around the drawing area, we use numbers, or in some cases, a series of numbers and letters that identifies what each of the notes is meant to be. Then, on the side of our drawing here, there is a keynotes legend which outlines what each of the keynotes is pointing to. In this case, we're going to make three keynote legends and put keynotes on our three drawings, on the floor plan, the roof plan, and this front elevation.
If you check your handout, you'll see that there are keynotes numbered one going up from there for each drawing, and this is common for an environment where you're making a new legend for every drawing. In some offices, the keynotes are preset, and you might not use every number. In this case, we're going to use every number as we add them to the drawings.
And also for our drawing sets, we are not provided the keynote legends in AutoCAD form. We're going to take a look at how to make different legends using different file types. So let's get started.
I'm going to jump into the CAD 301 plan model, and you'll see that my layer state is set to the floor plan. We can check that by hitting the drop-down here, and I can see that it is floor plan. When I go to my layer drop-down, I see that I have my ANO DIMS 48 and ANO SIMS 48.
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We're going to use the ANO SIMS 48 layer. I'll make that active. And I can close my XREFS palette.
And now we're going to follow along with the handout, placing keynotes where they go. To begin, let's bring in the keynote file. I enter and browse, and in the drafting folder, you'll see keynote.
For this course, we use a square, but other offices might use a different shape for their keynotes. I'll hit open. And as I zoom in on my handout, I can see that the first keynote is right here in this closet.
So I'm going to click where there's a little bit of space. That's keynote number one, enter. Okay.
And now I know that the number one talks about the closet. We can see on the handout, it says entry closet with 12 inch D shelf, that's deep, and full length pole. Excellent.
Now I want to add a keynote in position number two, which is right here. So I'll click the keynote symbol. I'll place two and I'll hit okay.
Next is on top of this fridge, keynote. I'll get away from the dimension line, click three. And now four is going to be on top of this washer and dryer, four and five.
But instead of placing a keynote and then drawing a leader, I want to make a new leader style that includes our keynote. So I'm going to go to the annotate tab, and here's multileader. Hit that dropdown, and you'll see that we have the VDCI keynote 48.
Clicking on VDCI keynote 48, and then the multileader command will also place a keynote. Here, I'm going to read that it says specify leader arrowhead location. We can see that first arrowhead is somewhere over here.
I'll choose this midpoint. I'll bring my arrow out and click, and then automatically a keynote will be placed at the end of that leader. This is number four, and I'll hit okay.
Now we can play with this. We can shorten the length of this leader, et cetera. But this is a keynote block inserted in the multileader.
Let's see what that looks like. I'm going to open up the leaders style manager and see that VDCI keynote 48 is set to my current. I'm going to modify it, and we see that when I go to the content tab that the source block is the keynote block.
So this block was already loaded into our project, and that's why you'll see the keynote here, and that's why it asked to redefine earlier. I'll hit okay and close. And now we can either use the keynote block itself when we don't need a leader, or use the multileader keynote 48 to place the rest.
So I'll go around and continue to place these leaders, and please follow along with me. Multileader, this one's going to be five. I'll just shorten that up a little bit.
Escape, escape, escape. Keynote again, six and seven are here. I'm going to move this dimension text up just a bit to make a little bit of room for my keynote right there.
Seven. I see keynote eight is a multileader that's above the range, and it has two different arrows. So I'll go multileader.
I'll start at this shift right click mid between two points here and here. This is eight. Okay.
And then I will click on this multileader and hit add leader. And this leader will come off to this side. Shift right click nearest.
I'll just pick this space here. Enter to say I'm done. Escape, escape, escape.
