Wipeouts and Annotative Text

I recently tried to add a wipeout to a bit of annotative DTEXT, and discovered that these two things don’t play well together in AutoCAD 2008. Basically, the text just disappears. So what do you do if you want to display some masked task at one particular scale? It’s easy.

First, make sure the scale you want to set the annotative text to exists in the drawing. Type ScaleListEdit, or click on the Annotation Scale on the bottom right of your AutoCAD window and select Custom. If the scale you need doesn’t exist, click add to add it. Hit okay on those two dialogs, and set your current scale to the scale you just added.

Now create an annotative text style if you don’t already have one. In the Text Style dialog (DDSTYLE), just make sure the “Annotative” check box is checked, then set your text height to whatever your want it to appear as in Paper Space. I usually use 0.125.

Now create some MTEXT (DTEXT won’t work). After you type your text, right click on the text area and select “Background Mask…” from the dropdown menu.

In the Background Mask dialog, check “Use background mask” and adjust your border offset factor as you see fit. Then check “Use drawing background color”, because you probably don’t want a colored mask - we’re trying to reproduce the wipeout effect.

Now hit okay, and hit okay to get out of the MTEXT editor. Select your text and look at the annotative scale setting in the floating Properties window.

Click on the “..” button to assign the desired scale to the text. After you add your scale, you can delete the default 1:1. You could also have set the “automatically add scales” feature by clicking on the second button to the right of the annotative scale selector.

Note that the background mask applies to the MTEXT box, not the text itself. So you might want to resize the box to fit perfectly around the text.