Creating a Reusable Floor Plan Keynote Legend in AutoCAD Using a Dedicated Xref File Setup

Okay, we need to jump in and create our keynote legends. We'll start with this one for the floor plan. You can see on the handout, it goes in this space.

And in this case, it is clearly text next to keynote symbols with a title at the top. I would like to make this in a new AutoCAD drawing and then X-ref this in, just in case we have multiple floor plans that use the same keynote legend, instead of building it directly onto this sheet. So before I do that, I wanna understand the measurements of the space we'll be working in.

If I go to quick measure and look in here, I see that it's four and a half inches wide and one feet, eight inches tall. When we start our new file, I wanna use four and a half and one feet eight as my designator for the space I'm gonna work in. Also, I'm gonna make the zero, zero point this top corner.

When we draw four and a half and one feet eight, we're gonna go down into the left into the negative, negative quadrant. All right, let's go file new, use the CD template, I'll hit open and file save. And in this case, we're gonna go out of the sheets folder and into the keynotes folder.

This folder says that it's empty, but if I take a look over here, I see that I actually have three files, two Excel files and one TXT file. And these are going to be where we get our data for these keynote files. But again, we haven't made any AutoCAD files yet.

So this is going to be named floor plan dash keynotes and I'll hit save. And now we can draw the bounding box for where we can add our geometry. If I go up to layer properties, I'm gonna start by making a no plot my current layer.

Now I'll go rectangle, zero comma zero, enter, D enter, 4.5 in the horizontal and one feet, eight inches in the vertical. You can see that because we were working in our CD template, this rectangle appears to be quite small on the screen. So I'll place it down to the lower left, zoom extents, control S to save.

I'll quickly use quick measure, make sure this is the right size and I'll check my ID points under utilities ID points to make sure this top right corner is zero, zero, zero. And it is. I'm gonna draw all of my geometry on layer zero.

And this is because we're going to bring this in on the ATTPL layer. And this is because we're gonna bring it in on the title blocks layer. And that's because layer zero will be used as a pass through layer or a chameleon layer.

So let's get started. First, I wanna draw a line across the top. That's the border between where it says floor plan keynotes and our keynotes themselves.

So I'm gonna go line. I'll go straight across the top. Enter to say I'm done.

And then I'll offset this. Oh, enter. This is gonna be one over two, half an inch.

And I'll come down and click. Now I don't need this line at the top because it is going to be doubled on top of our title block itself. So I'll select it and hit delete.

And now I can go to my text. In this case, I'm gonna use M text, but you could probably also use single line text. So I'm gonna go to multi-line text.

I'm gonna draw my rectangle here to here. This is going to be text style zero one. And I'm using one quarter inch high text.

And my justification is gonna be middle center. Make sure you go one over four, inch mark, enter. Now we can type floor plan keynotes.

And I'm gonna check the box to say close text editor. Now before we bring in any text, I wanna bring in one of our keynotes. So I'm gonna go I enter.

You can see the keynote file is already here because it's in our multi-leader style. And I wanna set my insertion scale to one. And I can bring one in and we can see what it looks like.

I'm gonna place it here and go one, okay. So just as a reminder, our keynote symbol itself is one quarter inch wide. And I'm going to want to put it in its own column that's going to be one quarter inch in from the side.

So I'm going to explode my rectangle, enter. And now we can offset this line in one quarter inch. Offset, one over four, enter.

This edge in to the side. Enter to say I'm done. And I'm going to do it one more time.

Enter to go back in at one quarter inch. Because this is going to be the shape where my text can go. And I'm gonna do one more eighth inch offset from this side.

Oh, enter, one over eight, enter. Because I'm going to bring my text in from this line to this line. Those are the bounds I want to use.

So for now, I'm gonna bring this one. Click the group to make it hot. Shift right click nearest.

And place it on top of this line. If we wanted to be very specific, we could also offset this down a quarter inch and place it at the intersection. Let's do that.

Offset, one over four, enter. This line down, enter. And then we can move this keynote to that intersection.