A little help please, got my first map back from drafting (new company) and they have not addressed clearing background on the text and annotations. I was told they will mask out the conflicting entities by changing the text to M-text and create a clean background. Seems more than a little troublesome.
bridger
Have them send you a sample first so you can make sure it plots correctly on your printer/plotter. I have seen issues with either the outline box plotting when you don't want it to, or the entire block out being plotted as a solid black box.
Sometimes Adobe PDF files have issues with different methods of wiping out the background, if you rely heavily on PDF's.
Regardless of the method they choose, best to test it out before investing too much time.
The background thing drives me crazy. I prefer to use a feature under EDIT, go down to TEXT and look for Trim Text. (While you are in that menu, take a look at all the tools in that text menu. There's stuff there that most people do not know about.)
Either put a wipeout behind your text (you will need to change the draw order) or use mtext with background.
bridger48, post: 329856, member: 6251 wrote: A little help please, got my first map back from drafting (new company) and they have not addressed clearing background on the text and annotations. I was told they will mask out the conflicting entities by changing the text to M-text and create a clean background. Seems more than a little troublesome.
I routinely use the MTEXT background masking. It works well and is quite reliable. The biggest piece of the job will be converting the DTEXT to MTEXT, but even that shouldn't be a huge deal (I use MTEXT for all my text, just so the background masking option is available). I'd, guess that (presuming your drawing is halfway well layerized) the job will take a good CAD tech 5 or 10 minutes.
Use mtext exclusively along with it's background mask and the drawing background color. Don't use a width value unless you need to (for long paragraphs that wrap), if you use 0.0 for the width the background will grow and shrink as needed. If you have a masked mtext object that doesn't seem to be masking, it may need to be brought to the front.
When CAD was introduced trimming geometry for text may have been acceptable but today you had better be going straight to paper. Otherwise the recipient of your DWG will not be impressed with your work. I've even seen recent drawings where the parcel lines were trimmed to the point circles and the segments listed short, not matching the labeled calls. Never trim the geometry, there is always a better way.
Never could understand trimming essential line work. Pretty much defeats the design part of "Computer Aided Drafting and Design", doesn't it?
Kinda like not using snaps.
I use Carlson 2012 in ACAD 2006. Will NEVER upgrade ACAD - "F" them bloodsuckers. Hoping Carlson will step up to Bricscad soon.
In my plot style table, I've set color 255 to 0% screening, so any entity set to color 255 plots as the color of the media, i.e. no ink. All of my map symbol blocks are hatched solid @ 255 and are at the front of the draw order. TEXTMASK and WIPEOUT raster images are made visible via TFRAMES, selected and converted to color 255 and are under the MTEXT objects in the draw order, which are at the front. Don't have issues plotting to .pdf doing this.
I'm sure there's a more elegant solution, but this works for me.
My 2å¢
SS
Sergeant Schultz, post: 329954, member: 315 wrote:
In my plot style table, I've set color 255 to 0% screening, so any entity set to color 255 plots as the color of the media, i.e. no ink. All of my map symbol blocks are hatched solid @ 255 and are at the front of the draw order. TEXTMASK and WIPEOUT raster images are made visible via TFRAMES, selected and converted to color 255 and are under the MTEXT objects in the draw order, which are at the front. Don't have issues plotting to .pdf doing this.
I do this too for some masks because wipeouts don't allow curves but a solid hatch in color 255 can consist of any combination of curves and lines for a border. It's also handy for circle symbols.
