Working with Text Styles

All text in an AutoCAD LT drawing has a text style associated with it. When you enter text, AutoCAD LT uses the current text style, which sets the font, size, angle, orientation, and other text characteristics. If you want to create text using a different text style, you can make another text style current. The example shows the settings for the STANDARD text style.

Example: Default Text Style Settings

The settings for the current text style are displayed at the prompts on the command line. You can use or modify the current text style or create and load a new text style. Once you've created a text style, you can modify its characteristics, change its name, or delete it when you no longer need it.

Creating and Modifying Text Styles

Except for the default STANDARD text style, you must create any text style that you want to use.

Text style names can be up to 31 characters long. They can contain letters, numbers, and the special characters dollar sign ($), underscore (_), and hyphen (-). AutoCAD LT converts the characters to uppercase. If you don't enter a text style name, AutoCAD LT automatically names the text style Stylen, where n is a number that starts at 1.

You can modify an existing text style in the Text Style dialog box by changing the settings. You can also update existing text of that text style to reflect the changes.

If you change an existing style's font or orientation, all text using that is affected as follows:

• Font, font style (bold, italic), and orientation (upside down, backwards, vertical) change
• Text height, width factor (compression), and obliquing angle do not change

If you rename an existing text style, any text using the old name assumes the new text style name.

You can remove any text styles not referenced in your drawing except the STANDARD text style. You can purge a text style at any time during your drawing session.

Using Text Styles with Previous Releases

In previous releases of AutoCAD LT, you could display PostScript fonts in your drawing. Because AutoCAD LT 97 cannot display PostScript fonts, Autodesk has supplied TrueType font equivalents in place of the PostScript fonts supplied with previous releases. The PostScript fonts supported in previous releases are mapped to the equivalent TrueType file in a font mapping file supplied by AutoCAD LT.

Assigning Text Fonts
Setting Text Height
Setting Obliquing Angle
Setting Horizontal or Vertical Orientation