So I’m sitting here in a classroom in Orlando listening to Peter Funk tell us some of the new functionality of AutoCAD – we Civil 3D users often love the new tools of Civil 3D, but neglect to find out about the basic stuff – AutoCAD enhancements! So as he was droning on (no, seriously, he’s fun to listen to…) I started playing around with something in Mtext. When doing so, I found something that’s been on my wish list for a long time. After the jump, you’ll find two things that excite me these days about Mtext.

What’s first? Full Justification as a justification option in Mtext. We’ve always had left justified, right justified, center justified, but I’ve never seen Full Justification (in case you’re wondering what I’m talking about, look at a newspaper – notice how all the columns are exactly the same width? That’s full justification.) Granted, full justification is as ugly as homemade sin, but I had a boss once that just bashed Autodesk because the program couldn’t do it. I’ve been quietly wishing for this for a while. Here’s a hint – the program calls it Distributed. Here’s the button the Mtext toolbar:

Here’s an illustration of fully justified Mtext:

The nicest feature, though, allows Mtext to use new functionality called Annotative Scaling – this lets you set your text size like you do in Civil 3D labels and have them plot correctly on paper. For example, a text style of simplex with a height of 0.08 would be the equivalent of the old Leroy style L80. Make sure you use the Annotative style to be able to use that feature (it’s off by default, I think.) Look around at some of the other blogs for how annotative scaling works…I’d be nice and provide links, but Autodesk won’t let us get an internet connection here in the classroom. Hmm, I think I just found another reason why I love Live Writer 😉 Now I just have to remember to publish this tonight.