Design work is not all 3D models and pretty renderings. To manufacture or build something you need to communicate with your team mates and that is most often delivered in the written word.
Once a design is complete the designer needs to deliver views of the model onto a 2D sheet as well as document instructions on how the product is manufactured and put together. Here is where text comes to the fore.
Having the correct font and text style is important. How you present your explanations to the client is as important as the design itself. You would like to show off professionalism as well as a bit of yourself.
So to make it as easy as possible to get the text to be exactly the same each time (no time setting up styles) you should set up your text styles and save it with your design data.
To set up your text styles to be consistent when opening up any drawing new or for modification, select the Manage tab and click on Styles Editor. On the left-hand side navigate down to Text style.
As default, you have Label Text and Note Text so you can either modify these two styles or you can create new. Options to be controlled include the following.
- Spacing
- Stretch percentage
- Colour
- Justification for your text
- Rotation
- Text font
- Text height
- Bold font
- Italic font
- Underlining of font
Once this is done there is one more step to complete.
On the Manage tab next to styles you need to make sure that you save the changes back into the styles database which resides in your design data folder. Inventor idw and dwg files do NOT save these styles directly inside the file, it outsources it to the design data folder.
To save the changes back into the design data folder, navigate to the manage tab again and click on the Save button. You have now saved your text style to be used in any document you see fit.
