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AutoCAD Productivity

Avoid Using ‘Standard’ in Text & Dimension Styles

by Michael Beall

From: AutoCAD Productivity Articles #141
Originally published: August 2015

In addition to Layer 0, every single drawing on the planet has a Text style called ‘Standard’, and a Dimension style called ‘Standard’. They're the defaults.

When developing company standards, it's best to not modify the Standard styles; leave 'em alone and make your own.

And here's why. Let's say you have text you added to Drawing A (using your modified ‘Standard’ text style to use the Trebuchet font), and you drag that text into Drawing B where the Standard text style uses the TXT.SHX font.

Since Drawing B already has a ‘Standard’ text style—see opening sentence, above—who do you think will "win" when it comes to how the text looks? The text in Drawing B will use the font which is already assigned to the Standard text style.

Copying text from one drawing to another

In the illustration, you see the result when I drag the text from Drawing A into Drawing B. Questions?

See all the articles published in August 2015

Michael's Corner

Between 2003 and 2016, Michael Beall (and one or two guests) wrote almost 600 articles for CADTutor. The focus of these articles is AutoCAD productivity, and although some of them are now more than a few years old, most remain relevant to current versions of AutoCAD. The article above is just one example. Check out Michael's Corner for a full listing.

Tip of the Day

Repeat for Efficiency

Recent InputSometimes, you may find yourself having to use the same command repeatedly. This can be a pain, unless you are aware that the previous command can always be repeated by hitting the Enter key on the keyboard or by using the right-click mouse button and selecting the name of the command you just used. Both these methods are more efficient than repeatedly finding a command on a toolbar or from a pull-down menu.

What's more annoying than having to repeat a single command (and more common) is having to repeat a sequence of maybe two or three commands. Obviously, you can't use the "Enter to repeat" trick. However, the right-click menu has another option that can help in these situations. Below the name of the last command used, is a menu option that says Recent Input. If you select this option, you will see a list of all the commands used in the current drawing session, with the most recently used at the top.

Using this method, you can repeat any sequence of commands without having to return to a toolbar or pull-down menu.

Note: This function is controlled by the inputhistorymode variable.

Today's tip is by Lazer

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