Looking at Additional Text Options
The following sections cover several optional text handling features that may prove useful to you. These features will enable you to speed up the display of text, handle missing font files, and insert text files into the current drawing.
Enabling the Quick Text Display
When AutoCAD opens or regenerates a drawing, if the drawing contains numerous text objects, it may take quite some time to complete the regeneration process, especially if the text is drawn with complex fonts. If you want to speed up the regeneration of the drawing and you do not need to actually see the existing text, enable the Quick Text mode. To enable the Quick Text mode, access the Display tab of the Options dialog box and select the Show Text Boundary Frame Only check box. When Quick Text is enabled, text and mtext objects are displayed as simple rectangles that contain no characters. If you enable Quick Text mode after opening a drawing, issue the REGEN command to redisplay the text as empty rectangles.
Note
Even with Quick Text enabled, new text objects are displayed as text characters— instead of as rectangles—while the DTEXT and MTEXT commands are active, which makes it easier to add text.
Specifying an Alternate Font File
Font files are not stored with the drawing file. If a font file that is referenced in the drawing is not available when the drawing is opened, an error message is displayed. You are then prompted to choose a replacement font file. If you want to bypass all such error messages, you can specify a font file that is automatically used whenever a needed font file cannot be found. You specify this alternate font file in the Alternate Font File setting under Text Editor, Dictionary, and Font File Names in the Files tab of the Options dialog box. The default alternate font is simplex.shx.
Caution
A couple of problems can occur when you use an alternate font. If the missing font file contains special characters that the alternate font file does not have, the text on the drawing may end up incomplete. Furthermore, because the space that a line of text occupies depends on the font file used to generate the text, you may find that when the alternate font is applied, the text on the drawing looks out of place or does not fit properly. The best solution is to obtain the correct font files and use them unless you are sure you have a suitable alternative font file.
Mapping Fonts
If you need to specify more than one alternate font file, specify a font mapping file. A font mapping file is a text file in which each line in the file specifies the font file to be replaced and its substitute font file (separated by a semicolon). The default font map file is ACAD.FMP. You can identify a different font map file by changing the Font Mapping File setting under Text Editor, Dictionary, and Font File Names in the Files tab of the Options dialog box.
Drawing Text as Attributes
An alternate method to drawing text objects that are to be incorporated into block definitions is to draw attributes. Attributes behave much like text objects but have additional functions beyond displaying text. Attributes are discussed in more detail in Chapter 9, “Understanding the Query Features in AutoCAD 2002.”
Dragging and Dropping Text Files
In Windows, you can drag a text file from the desktop or from Windows Explorer and drop it into your drawing. AutoCAD will automatically insert the file as an mtext object, using the current text settings for the text height, rotation angle, and text style.
Copying Text Using the Clipboard
You also can copy text from any application to your Clipboard and paste the contents into your drawing. If you use the PASTE command, the contents are dropped into your drawing as an embedded object. If you use the PASTESPEC command, you can choose to paste the Clipboard contents as text, in which case the text is drawn as an mtext object.
The Clipboard operations depend on OLE (Object Linking and Embedding). For more information on AutoCAD’s OLE features, refer to Chapter 23, “Effective Applications for OLE Objects in AutoCAD 2002.”