QCad User Reference Manual

# 23. Texts

CAD Toolbar:

Menu:

    Draw - Text

Command:

    text

Description:

Use this tool to create single line and multi line texts.

Procedure:

1. Just after launching the tool, the text dialog is presented in which you can choose the font and enter the text you want to create (Figure 34).
2. Choose the font name and attributes in the upper left area of the dialog (Figure 34/1). For a complete list of all available fonts, please refer to the appendix. In the "Height" field, enter the height of the text in the unit of your drawing. To choose normal line spacing, click the checkbox "Default line spacing". You can increase or decrease the line spacing by disabling the checkbox and entering a value in the "Line spacing" box. The value entered is a factor relative to the default (1.0). Valid values range from 0.25 to 4.00. Values outside this range are allowed but break compatibility to other CAD programs such as AutoCAD.
3. Choose the alignment of the text (Figure 34/2).
4. Enter the angle for the text (Figure 34/3). Normal horizontal texts have an angle of zero degrees.
5. Enter the text you want to create in the large text box (Figure 34/4). You can also use the icons above the box to load texts from files, save texts that you have entered or to paste texts from the clipboard.
   To enter special symbols that are not available on your keyboard, you can use the combobox at the bottom left of the dialog (Figure 34/5). Simply choose a symbol from the list and it will be placed at the current cursor position in the text box.
   If the symbol list does not contain the symbol you need, please use the comboboxes at the bottom right to choose any character from the unicode char set (Figure 34/6). Note that the font you have chosen might not contain the characters you insert. In that case the characters will not be displayed in the drawing.
   To insert a unicode character, select the unicode page in the first combobox and choose the character from the second combobox. Now click the button at the right to insert the character at the current cursor position.
6. Click "OK" to exit the text dialog.
7. Use the mouse to specify the location of the text or enter a coordinate in the command line.
8. Often, users need to create a number of similar texts. For that reason the text tool does not terminate after creating the first text entity. You can change the text and the text angle in the options toolbar and create other texts with similar settings.
9. Right click or press Escape to stop the text tool.

Figure 34: The text creation dialog.

## 23.1. Advanced Text Commands

Sometimes it can be useful to embed two small text lines on top of each other in a text (e.g. for tolerances). There is a sepcial escape sequence you can type anywhere in the text to achieve that. For example the sequence "10\S+0.05\-0.05; Millimeter" would produce a tolerance symbol as shown in Figure 35.

Figure 35: Text produced by the string "10\S+0.05\-0.05; Millimeter".