Adding Text to Elevation Views in AutoCAD: Top Plate, Floor Level, and Drawing Title

Let's add some text to this elevation view in preparation for copying it to the other views. In order to do that, I'm going to go to my layer drop down.

Let's unhide a no plot. Let's unhide a floor level. And let's set a text to our current layer.

We see that on our handout, we have text here, and here, and down here in the bottom. These three bits of text represent the top of plate line, the finished floor line, and the drawing title. Now in this course, we will put the drawing title in the model space, but in future courses, we'll see how the drawing titles go onto paper space elements.

But for now, let's keep the text in model space. If we check the handout, we can see that up here, we have text that says top of plate, here, floor level. Let's start with these two pieces of text.

I'll go up to my text drop down and choose multiline text. And I'll zoom in here. I'll choose this endpoint as my first point.

And then I'll just come out and choose any point over here. The text will float up here at the top. But before we type anything, we can change our justification to say bottom left.

Then it'll move down to where we drew our text box. This text is fairly simple. It's T period O period plates.

Notice I got a little automatic text lightning bolt here. I'll remove bullets or numbering to have it jump back to our point there. It thought T period was a number list.

Now this text is six inches high, but I'm going to do a Control A to select all the text. And I want to make this 4.5 inches high. Hit ENTER.

Perfect. We have four and a half inch high text, T O plate, and I had to remove numbering. Okay, I'll close my text editor.

And we see that we have the top plate now right on the line. But if we look at the handout, we have to move it slightly up the line and get it away from that datum symbol that we'll bring in in a minute. So for now, I'll click top of plate and nudge it, holding Control, up a couple of times and to the right a couple of times.

Just about there. Yours does not have to be in the exact same position as mine. Wherever it is like this is good enough.

Now I'm going to go up to my layers and choose layer zero and make it my current layer. Let's unlock layer zero. And let's go I enter to bring in our block for that datum.

So I'm on layer zero. I'll browse. I'm going to find in my blocks folder, drafting.

And here we're going for datum point. Perfect. I'll hit open.

Now, if I check my options here, I can see that my options are all too small. I forgot to change my uniform scale. That's okay.

I'll still place my datum point here at the endpoint. And we can see it very, very small. If I grab it with a selection window, left to right, right click properties, I can change the scale in the X, Y, and Z right here.

So I'll do that. 48 enter, Y 48 enter, Z 48 enter. Perfect.

Now we can see the datum in the right spot. I'll close my properties. And if you need to, go ahead and select your top of plate text and nudge it some more, holding control.

Mine was a little close to the datum. There we go. And now we can copy these two elements from this line to this line.

So with a selection window going left to right, I'll select these two objects. There we go. And then I will go copy.

Now there's geometry over here I can pick and I can kind of come in, but now you see I have some extra datum elements, more endpoints, more midpoints. In order to make this copy easy, I'm simply going to come over to the other side of the drawing and pick this endpoint. Then I can copy down to the perpendicular here or to the endpoint here.

It doesn't matter. I know that they're the same point. So I'll click enter to say that I'm done.

Remember when we make copies in AutoCAD, we don't have to select the geometry we're copying. Now we can come in and edit this top of plate text to say floor level. So I'll double click, grab this text and type floor level.

I'll close the text editor. Excellent. These elements are now done.

Let's pan over here and add that drawing title. I have to switch my current layer back to a text. And let's draw a new multiline text object.

So I'll go text, multiline text. And in this case, I'm going to draw a slightly different window. I'm going to start on the ground line here.

And I'm going to do a shift right click nearest. And I'm going to pick the bottom line of my no plot all the way out at the end. And I'll go somewhere over here, giving myself enough room to type in all the text I need.

Now this justification is a little different. I'm going to go middle right, middle right. That puts the grip point right on this magenta line.

And the text is going to type out and slide from right to left. Now in this case, let's start by typing our text as six inches high. But let's first hit underline.

We can see it's underlined on the handout. Now this is an elevation, but which elevation is it? Well, in this case, we're on the front elevation, but I'm not going to type front elevation. Instead, I'm going to type elevation and leave it as that.

Let's click close text editor. This text is going to be copied onto our other elevation views. And we don't accidentally want to forget where we typed front elevation one too many times.

And we have two elevations labeled front elevation. It's better to have less data on the drawing when we do this type of copying, then more data that gets us in trouble. But before we copy it, we can see that six inches was not quite tall enough.

So I'll click the text, right click properties, and all over here on text height, let's try nine inches. Enter. There we go.

That looks better. I'll close my properties, hit escape, escape, escape. Let's look at our front view and control S to save.

In the next video, we will copy this geometry to our other views. See you there.