Hi Mary. The issue is resolved (99% sure it is at least). It was actually related to Visual ARQ annotations. There is a setting referred to as “Dimension Style” (which allows you to pick an Annotation Style, which was part of my confusion) which eliminates the problem… I think… Otherwise, having model space scaling changes the text size in an undesirable way. But anyways, I think I’ve figured that out… I just don’t have time to enjoy my new found knowledge .
I’ve been rigorously testing Rhino annotations. They are much easier to use once you get used to them. I’m finding only a slight speed difference from AutoCAD to Rhino with regard to dimensions, leaders, and most basic annotations (keeping in mind that I’ve been using ACAD for ages). The text editor feels like the bottle neck to me.
Hi @keithscadservices ,
I appreciate the update and all the details.
I did not know that VA linked their dimension style to our Annotation style.
There must be a reason why, but I think it would be simpler to go direct to our Annotation style.
Could be something legacy they are trying to maintain.
I need to know more about this:
RTtextEdit is available when double clicking on a piece of text.
And edit the text in the Properties Panel. (PropertiesPage → Text)
Which of these is not working for you?
Thank you for the additional help understanding this statement.
Sincerely,
Mary Ann Fugier
Last weekend I did a lot of testing. I made a 16 minute video comparing the speed of Rhino verses AutoCAD… it’s actually very close, and I realized the video is next to useless… it’s the text editor that’s really slowing me down. In the videos you’ve shared in my other post (which are awesome by the way, thanks!!) you’re able to create well-documented drawings relatively quickly. The bottle neck in those videos is the text editor.
I made a little GIF to help discuss things, which ended up being a pain. You really need to try it out yourself.
I’ll briefly explain some of the advantages. The text editor itself is quite ‘advanced’ if you could describe it as that… but it’s been this advanced for years (and years). The text editor itself is actually quite more advanced than Revit’s and even this forum’s. Anyways:
I can adjust the width and height relative to the surrounding elements while in the text editor. This doesn’t sound like a big deal but it is. Having to select the text after and drag the control point can be a bit cumbersome. In many instances the user will have to go back into the text to figure out where to break the lines.
Super/Sub-script is done with the click of a button. I can live with Rhino’s stacking double-brackets but ACAD is way ahead on that too. If Rhino added some way to create sub/super-script similar to how you stack with the double-brackets, that would be okay. Not great but okay.
Bullet points!! But I don’t mind manually creating bullet points if we have the next two options.
Line spacing: This alone provides so much flexibility.
Symbols: Out of shear curiosity I decided to see if I could copy a bullet point from the web and paste it into Rhino’s text editor. Sure enough… If that is possible then how hard would it be to have a drop-down with commonly used symbols?
Colors might be important to many as well.
I remember when I went from AutoCAD to Revit and everyone was touting Revit as the ‘future’, and upon using the text editor, realizing it was a piece of crap (relative to all the hype). I don’t know what it is but it seems like text editors started regressing at some point. Maybe they are insanely hard to program or something…
I put other Rhino annotations through their paces. Everything works really good as is almost (well within being close enough) to AutoCAD speed; It takes a slight amount of extra time to select control points verses ACAD grips. I can also use commands such as “stretch” to move stuff without even pre-selecting it. When I use crossing windows in Rhino the control points disappear if multiple points are selected. But having the ‘PointsOn’ set to a hot key cures this. All the above only drops Rhino’s annotation speed down 10-20% verses ACAD’s. I will be able to create some macro that brings this even closer (It won’t be too hard to create my AutoLISP tools in Rhino using C#/RhinoCommon, it’s a really good API). The very small speed advantage AutoCAD has over Rhino regarding anything listed in this paragraph is absolutely not worth paying the extra cost for verses Rhino’s very reasonable cost. And users gain things outside of shear speed (for example, dimensions and text are viewable from any direction in 3D, pretty awesome!).
Even with a few small improvements were added to the text editor I think it would be a huge bonus. But if we got a ‘CAD’ style text editor (the AutoCAD clones have only recently caught up to ACAD’s advanced text editor capabilities; it’s not exclusive to just AutoCAD) it would be a HUGE bonus. Even a simpler variant; some of the advanced settings in ACAD’s text editor kind of suck (for example, the columns).
The one thing that would be a huge improvement on text editing on my side is the ability to have different text styles in the same text block : this currently kind of work with local formatting (bold, italic, etc) and fonts but is not totally reliable (there’s a tendency to apply local formatting to all the text or just ignore it).
Being able on top of that to also have different text color and text size in the same annotation would be very convenient ! (instead of having to create 2 texts and ajust them afterward on content change for exemple).
WRT to the text editor: what is sorely missing is block text justification (justified text). I think there is a feature request already logged for this. I have to resort to other programs to add text just for this sometimes, which is a pitty.
Hi Rajaa,
It does not seem to work from the layout, or at least I did not figure out how to select the section there. I could export from the model space, but only the section, no elevation lines.
Perhaps, I was expecting this to be a live Make 2D but it is only a live section.
What I meant before was that it would be useful to export a layout (i.e. the page) as a vectorial file. This is not it I don’t think.
Is there any expectation of having the make 2d live. Normal make2d simply crashed (did not test extensively)
I did not find a way of easily put the section on a detail in layout. I made a detail viewport and then chose the associated view. Is that it?
I still could not use this as a vectorial export to PDF. and it seems not to be possible.
As it is this is a very moderately interesting tool, not too different from the clipping plane in you’re using it to visualize while modelling, and with a slight convenience of being live when you do a section. However, I cannot remember the last time we used the section tool in our projects because section without elevation is barely necessary.
Thanks for the summary. I believe that all of these are all on the tracker already.
I will look up the YT’s over the next week, and get them in the post.
By doing that, when they are available in a build, the Forum is notified automatically.
The adjusting the borders from in side the text editor is interesting.
If you look a back to Rhino 5, that is how you adjusted the text margins.
But it did not preview on the viewport display.
I will add the YT’s if any are missing issues and post here in the next week or two.
Thank you again for all your time sending all the details here and in other threads…
It is huge help in improving Rhino.
One thing that’s a huge help in ACAD is the fact that the text is created in the layout:
The user can place/adjust the text relative to surrounding components while they type the text. You can also add tabs and indents in that ruler across the top. It doesn’t feel like a big deal because many CAD users are simply used to it and take it for granted. Going to Rhino’s dialog box actually feels quite strange. As a novice programmer I can’t even imagine how the programming works for this.
AutoCAD’s (and any similar program) actually have very advanced text editors. And some have been like this for years for years. Then they just fell off the map/regressed. Revit is a great example. It’s obviously harder to create a text editor with modern interfaces (I don’t know why but I suspect it’s harder as C++ based CAD GUI’s have had em for years). Eto forms actually has a sample project that is a rich text editor. I can’t get it to work because I’m missing a reference. It’s worth a look since Rhino uses Eto forms… maybe it’s almost compatible as-is.
AutoCAD’s text editor is actually even more advanced than MS Word’s lol.
Adding even a little bit of functionality to the text editor will help. We’ll take what we can get obviously. But the more the merrier.
There are ways to get similar performance to ACAD’s editor without the complexity. For example, having more symbols (including bullet points) in the ‘common symbols’, along with line indenting and line spacing, would allow us to just manually create bullet points. ACAD’s are one click, but the default formatting sucks so you have to spend a few seconds fixing it. It hardly takes more time to create them manually.
If one-click superscript/subscript cannot be added, at least having a way to do it with the square brackets would be cool. But maybe that’s asking for compatibility issues with text in/from older drawings.
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