In this lesson I’ll show you how to create new text styles. They control the appearance of all inscriptions, so it is important to adapt them to your needs.

I will use an architectural drawing as an example, and you can find it among the exercise files. To create styles, the Style command is used, and I will launch it by pressing S + T + Enter. As soon as the new frame appears on the screen, you will be able to see all existing styles. Their names are on the left, but we won’t get into that right now, instead I’ll show you how to create a new style. For that, you must first click on the New button and then enter the appropriate name. I will enter Technical in this field and go to the next step with OK.

As you can see, AutoCAD has automatically selected a font called Arial for the new style, which is not the best solution. Namely, this type of letter looks quite correct in a text processing program such as Word, but for technical drawings it is necessary to choose something simpler. So I’m going to click on this arrow and it will show a list that includes all the installed fonts. The largest part consists of the so-called TrueType fonts and I’m not interested in them right now, so I have to scroll down a bit and look for the content next to the icon with the compass symbol and the lowercase letter a. It is a special font that comes from AutoCAD itself, so it is logical that I choose it for this purpose. As you can see, all the letters are made of simple lines, which makes them ideal for use in technical drawings. There are several more such fonts on my list, and the simplest of them is called Simplex. This type of font suits me best, so I will click on the item of the same name and go to the next parameter.

The Height option allows you to set the height of the font right away, but I wouldn’t recommend doing that. It is much better to leave this value equal to zero, because in this way the size of the text can be determined later, before the actual input.

Technical drawings often do not have enough space to accommodate longer texts. This problem can be solved to some extent by using slightly narrower letters, so I will enter a value that is less than zero in the field called Width Factor. I think that 0.9 will be quite enough, which means that the future text will take up 10% less space than usual.

Since I have entered all the necessary parameters in this way, I can click on the Apply button and close this box with OK. In the next lesson, I’ll show you how to enter plain text.