Word Art and AutoCAD

[Flores]

I was trying to find a better way of extruding text in ACAD. Normally, you write the text, use Express Tools' "text explode", exploded the text again, cleaned up the lines, and then used "mpedit" to put everything back together. You might want to give the following a try because you don't have to "clean" the text for extruding, AND you can also come up with some interesting shapes.

With M$ Word, I started Word Art and came up with these 2 shapes:
http://www.cadimage.net/flores/Word_Art1.jpg

I then started ACAD and used Paste Special's following option:
http://www.cadimage.net/flores/paste_special1.jpg

After inserting it, I got this:
http://www.cadimage.net/flores/flores1.jpg

You can barely see it, but the first shape has 2 sets of text, a light-blue and a dark-blue. I deleted the dark-blue text and left the light-blue text:
http://www.cadimage.net/flores/flores2.jpg

Since the text is already "clean", all you have to do is extrude it. Note that I had to subtract the inside shape from the outside shape of some letters (P, a, o, and e). I then rendered it so that you can see it (don't judge me on the rendering because the words are standard colors, no materials or lights were used).

http://www.cadimage.net/flores/flo3.jpg

Hope you find this interesting,
Flores

[CADTutor]

Excellent technique Flores - I would never have thought of using WordArt.

[tlyall]

That is truly excellent Flores.... I figured i would give it a try. Apparently you are not limited to just Word Art, you can also use its clipart and preset autoshapes. The lightning bolt is right out of Words AutoShapes.

I can really see this coming in handy with some renderings. Thanks for the tip Flores!

http://www.cadimage.net/postimages/name.jpg

[gcp310]

much easier than exporting coredraw text,then importing into autocad.

G