Working with Text

Notes are how a drawing explains itself: room names, materials, instructions, revision notes.

Text in Pingendum 2D is placed by one tool, not two. There is no separate single-line and multi-line command. The Text tool writes a note where you click, and its Box option makes that note wrap to a width when you want a paragraph.

Prerequisites

• The drawing's scale is set — see The drawing scale.

Set the drawing's scale before you write any notes

Text height is specified as it will be on paper — 2.5 mm by default — and it is fixed in the drawing the moment the note is placed.

Unlike dimensions and hatches, text does not follow a later change of scale. Change the scale after writing your notes and the notes will be the one thing that comes out wrong.

Placing a note — TX

Annotate ▸ Text (TX):

1. Click where the note goes.
2. Type it, right there on the drawing, at the size it will print.
3. Finish with Ctrl+Enter, Esc, or by clicking away.
4. Click again for the next note. The tool keeps going until Enter or Esc.

The whole run is one undo step.

What to expect. The text is written in place, at its paper size — what you see while typing is what will print. So you can judge straight away whether a note fits where you have put it.

The options

Justify explained. Your click is an anchor; justification says which part of the text holds onto it. "Bottom left" means the text starts at your click and runs right. "Middle centre" means the text is centred on it. Choose it before placing a column of notes and they line up without fiddling.

Box is what you want for a paragraph rather than a label: give it a width and the text flows inside it.

Rotation by two points is the quiet convenience: click along a wall or a pipe and the label runs parallel to it, without you working out any angle.

While you are typing

This catches everyone once

Enter makes a new line, it does not finish the note. Ctrl+Enter is how you finish.

Symbol shorthands

Type these and they turn into the symbol:

The formatting buttons

The small buttons above the text while you type let you add:

• a font, a colour, a height;
• a stacked fraction;
• the symbols °, ±, ⌀ and ²;
• a Field — text that fills itself in from the drawing.

Editing a note afterwards

Double-click any note to open it for editing. Annotate ▸ Edit Text (ED) does the same for a selected note or one you click, and so does right-clicking it.

The text changes as you type. Esc or Ctrl+Enter finishes, as one undo step.

If you delete all the characters, the note is left as it was rather than disappearing. To get rid of a note, select it and press Delete.

To change a note's height, style, position, rotation, width, line spacing or justification, select it and use the Properties panel. Text has more editable properties there than any other object.

Text styles

What a style is. A named combination of font, width factor and slant, so that every note in a drawing matches without you setting each one by hand.

Standard is built in, and uses Noto Sans — which ships with Pingendum 2D, so text measures identically on every machine that opens your drawing.

Height is not part of the style. Each piece of text carries its own, so two notes in the same style can be different sizes.

See Styles and Annotation Scales.

Notes that have to work at several scales

If the same note must read correctly in viewports at different scales, make it annotative. It then carries a copy for each scale, each sized for paper. See Annotative objects.

If a note has apparently vanished in a viewport, this is nearly always why: it has no copy for that viewport's scale.

Finding and replacing

Edit ▸ Find and Replace (Ctrl+F, alias FIND) searches the words in texts, dimensions, leaders and attribute values, and can replace them.

Useful when a revision renames a room throughout a drawing and you do not fancy finding every mention by eye.

Related

Next Steps

Next: Dimensioning a Drawing