Using Remote Text in AutoCAD: Tuesday Tips With Brandon
In my tip today I wanted to highlight an older Express Tool that tends to get overlooked by many users: Remote Text (RTEXT command). It has been made less popular in some aspects by Fields (you can see my tips on Fields here), but it still has some specific, very useful, and underutilized functions that can really come in handy! Lets take a look at using RTEXT in your own drawings.
2 comments:
I feel like there is a deep dark rabbit hole you can go down in the world of AutoCAD commands, and somewhere along the way you will find this remote text command. As the post suggests, this feature has been lost among the addition of fields and sheet sets, but still provides a unique way of integrating living text into a document. I, for one, would probably not utilize this feature unless for some reason I wanted to allow other users to edit the bast .txt file and have it automatically carry into the .dwg file, for instance a production/project manager. Then again, I don't particularly like information coming into my files without my knowledge, in which case I could simply copy and paste external information straight in, or just edit the text block directly. Nevertheless, I am sure at some point in time I will stumble across an instance where I'll need to use this function, and vividly remember blogging about it in grad school.
With new features coming out with every version of AutoCAD, there are often twenty (or more) ways to achieve any one action. Finding different methods for something can sometimes feel like an archaeological dig! It is one of the reasons that I love reading the articles about AutoCAD features, bugs, and news on the Green Page - I always learn something new! The remote text feature seems particularly useful. Being able to link text in a drafting to a text file means I can update something that is written in multiple draftings all at once! For example, many of the draftings I have seen have a little disclaimer on them about copyright or engineering stuff. If the legal team of whatever company decides to change the text, the technical detailers might lose hours updating all ongoing projects. Instead, if they were smart, they could have built the remote text into their title block, and update all of their ongoing stuff in a matter of minutes!
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