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How do you create a free form annotation?
The free form annotation gives the user more control over how the label appears in your drawing area. It allows for the use of any character on the keyboard to be input as part of the annotation, so it's a powerful tool for quickly visualizing what is happening at a given element. The tool can be used for displaying labels in profiles and in the element symbology for the elements in your model drawing space.
1) Locate the profile annotations window on the left side
2) Highlight one of the elements you want to annotate by clicking on it (see blue box) and then click the new button (see red box)
3) First click the new button to create the new annotation (red box). Next leave the 'Field Name' as <Free Form Annotation> (blue box) and click the ellipsis button next to the line below that (green box). This opens the free form annotation window.
4) Now click the 'Append > ' button and choose the different properties for how you want to create your label. How you layout your label is how it will look on the drawing area. You can choose to stack you labels, lay them out linearly, and include other prefixes, suffixes, characters, or words. Please see the screen shot below.
Notice that you physically enter the spaces and the line breaks. This allows the annotation to look exactly how you have entered it on the drawing area. <%u> is the key code that allows that units to be displayed for a given property.
Here is what the annotation looks like in the profile:
After the annotation is placed you also have the ability to left click on it and drag it to any location you want. The locations can also be preset on the annotation properties that can be seen in the screen shot below step 3.
You also have the ability to add a leader line, which is the line with the arrow that is seen in the screen shot below in the blue circle. To place it right click on the annotation in the engineering profile drawing pane and select "Annotation Properties" from the menu. When the Annotation Properties window opens click the check boxes for "Show Leader Line" and/or "Show Leader Arrow" (see screen shot below).
Annotation Properties Dialog is show below:
1) Highlight one of the elements you want to annotate by clicking on it and then click the new button (see red box) and choose 'New Annotation'.
2) Free Form Annotation is selected by default in the annotation properties dialog box (see the red box). Click the ellipsis button (blue box) to open the free form annotation window as seen in step 4 above. The rest of the steps for creating the free form annotation in the element symbology are the same as those outlined for the profile above.