June 20, 2013

AutoCAD tip: rotate multiple texts at once to readable orientation

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When we work with our drawing, we often need to rotate our objects, mirror them, and make necessary adjustment.

If you have many texts in your drawing, either they are texts, mtexts or block attributes… you may see them rotated to different angles. They can be very hard to read!

When I was in college, my lecturer taught me that we must be able to read annotations from bottom of the paper, or from the right side of the paper. The bottom of the paper is defined by the title block orientation, of course.

To fix our drawing to follow that rules, there is a tool to quickly fix this: Rotate text/TORIENT.

Accessing Rotate text tool

This is an express tool, so if you must have express tools installed. If you use AutoCAD LT, unfortunately this tool is not available for you.

You can access this tool on express tool tab> text panel. Click the small arrow below modify text. Click rotate button.

If you love command line, simple type TORIENT then press [enter].

rotate text

How rotate text works

The procedure is described on help file. However, let’s see how it works.

After you activate the tool, you can select all texts you want to rotate. Press enter after you finish with the selection.

Now you have most readable as default option. Just press [enter] if you want this option.

torient option

Or if you want to define text orientation angle, you can type the angle then press [enter]. Of course, you can click points to define the angle too.

See this image. The left image is how the original texts looks like. If you choose most readable, then the orientation will be like on the right top. It maintain the original angle, but oriented so you can read the texts from bottom or right side of the paper.

If you type 0. Then the result is like on the right bottom. Pretty useful, right?

 

rotate text result

See how it works on YouTube!

Thank you to R.K. McSwain who brought the tip at this aligning text tip. And thank you to Mary Kachler who mentioned about this on LinkedIn group!

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About Edwin Prakoso

Edwin works as an Application Engineer in Jakarta, Indonesia. He has 4 years experience in building industry, then start to work for Autodesk reseller.
He is certified as Revit Architecture 2010 certified professional and AutoCAD 2013 certified professional.
He loves sharing his experience and starts to blog on CAD notes. Now using CAD is more to a lifestyle for him than working.
You can reach him on twitter @CADnotes. You can also connect with him on LinkedIn. If you prefer email, reach him at edwin.prakoso@cad-notes.com.

  • http://cadsetterout.com/autocad-tutorials/how-increase-your-productivity-autocad-properties-palette/ Paul

    Hi Edwin,

    Another way to achieve this, is to open the properties palette - select all the text and set it’s rotation property to 0 (or whatever angle you want).

    This is also a good way to align text in the X or Y axis :)

    http://cadsetterout.com/autocad-tutorials/how-increase-your-productivity-autocad-properties-palette/ 

    Take care.

    -Paul-

    • http://cad-notes.com Edwin Prakoso

      Thanks Paul.
      I guess the benefit of this method is it can rotate text to nearest readable angle. Not only uniform angle. And it works for block attributes too.

      • http://twitter.com/byornmena Brad Mena

        The ability to globally manipulate block attributes is a huge time saver after an ATTSYNC update. Thanks Edwin!