Annotating Drawings
There are three primary methods of annotating drawings in Autocad:
MTEXT – allows you to add text to a document
MLEADER – draws a leader and associated text
DIM – draws a dimension
All three of these annotations have styles that can be selected, adjusted and saved. The style editor for each is located in the pull down tab on the annotation section of the home ribbon at the top of the screen. The button on the left in the pull down menu is the style manager and the pull down on the right allows you to select from pre-made styles.
I recommend using annotative styles for all of your annotations. Annotative means that they will be adjusted to fit the scale of the viewport they are drawn in. Select Annotative in the styles manager menus. Annotative styles will be denoted by a trianglular scale symbol next to the name. Annotative objects will only show up at the scale they are drawn at. If you change scales, they will seem to disappear (you can rectify this by changing their annotative scale in the properties menu. If you are drawing annotative objects in model space, AutoCAD will ask you to select a scale that they will be viewed at.
When adding annotation, I suggest going to paper space, double clicking inside the viewport you want to annotate, and adding your annotations. As long as you have an annotative style selected, they will automatically adjust the scale you are drawing at. Locking the viewport will make this easier (this is the small lock icon next to the drawing scale).
Here are a few notes on each style menu:
STYLE (mtext style manager) – choose annotative, and select the height you want the text to show up on the page (1/8”, 3/16”, ¼” are all common)
DIMSTYLE (dimension style manager) – choose annotative, and set units to architectural
MLEADERSTYLE – choose annotative, you can use a text style you created in the mtext style manager for the content of the leader
Hatching (Fills)
AutoCAD uses the HATCH command to fill in areas of the drawing with patterns. When you type HATCH, you will get two options in the command line for how to place fills. One is pick points which will create a hatch in the area that you click on, this can be a little glitchy if your drawing is very complicated. The other option is select objects which will hatch objects that you select. This will work better if the objects you select are closed. You can close an open poly line by selecting the line and turning the close option to yes in the PROPERTIES menu.
If you want to make a hatch without a border, you can delete the border, or move the border to the defpoints layer, which is a layer that does not print.
I generally put all hatches on a hatch layer, which I can make a gray color that prints with a 50% screening. See the printing page to learn more about this.
You can change the scale and angle of hatches with the tool bars at the top of the screen. Keep in mind that hatches will look different in model space vs. paper space, so you will want to check that they look correct in paper space before printing.
MA (MATCHPROPERTIES) allows you to select a hatch and apply it to other existing hatches. Note that hatches made at the same time will all have the same style hatch (unless you select separate hatches under the pull down menu at the top of the screen).