Anyone using rhino for patent drawings?

Saw this thread and wanted to leave a long-ish note on annotations. I think one thing that would improve any kind of annotated drawings (including patent drawings) would be a better Text tool and additional text commands. This is one area where Rhino still feels a little clunky to me compared to some other programs (particularly Adobe.) I’ve compiled a few notes around annotated drawings where I think Rhino could be a lot more efficient:

  1. I think a series of text editing commands would be useful in addition to adding stuff via the Text command popup - like typing Bold for instance, to embolden your text

  2. The font searchbar in the Text popup could be more efficient if you could type multiple letters. Right now you have to type the first letter of a font and then scroll around to find it.

  3. Units should be adjustable (i.e. points are common for American typography. Right now I type like 12/72 inches to get my 12 point font, which may be required by an office.)

4. It would be nice to be able to select and edit text directly in the Viewport rather than having to go back into the Text popup.

  1. There could be more snaps on the Text object bounding box. For starters, there could be the ones would be for a normal rectangle shape. ALSO, there could even be additional toggle-able snaps on text objects, such as a baseline, X-height, ascender, descender, and cap height. Right now you often just the Cap and the Descender (highest and lowest points) which are not the most useful points to be working with when moving text around and aligning it to stuff (see here for definitions of these terms)

  2. Additional settings for fonts: Small Caps, ability to adjust kerning, letting, tracking, vertical scale, baseline shift, slant, indent, drop caps, support for bulleted/numbered lists, justified text, easy access to the full glyphset of a font would all be useful.

  3. Ability to “Flow” text from one textframe to another (for say, a two column page where you’re revising the body text) - Also as an aside, it would be fun to be able to put text into a custom shape like a weird closed curve.

  4. Ability to select multiple Text objects and change a property all at once. Say I have my document and I have it all in Copy but the place i’m working for does everything in Helvetica - changing everything individually here would be a pain and I would want to change it all at the same time.

Sorry this is a lot. Happy to put it elsewhere if this isn’t the right thread for it. But overall, I think Rhino would be a better design program if it better supported design that uses typography.

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