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For these reasons, I have added an outline of the workflow here to help you create annotations more efficiently.

Follow these steps to create a note:

1. Click the Note toolbar button on the Annotations toolbar.

2. Click in the graphics window where you want to create the note or click an entity that you want the note leader to point to, and then click where you want the note.

3. Type the note. Press Enter at the end of a line, or, if you intend to force the note to wrap later, just allow the line of text to be as long as it wants to be. While you create the note, the text box expands to the right until you press Enter, and it expands down every time a line is added.

At the end of the last line of the note, do not press Enter again (this creates extra lines), but you may press Esc. Esc gets you out of the note and ready to place a new note. When you press Esc twice, you get out of the note you were typing, and then get out of the Note command altogether.

4. Another way to finish the note is to click the mouse outside of the text box. After that, if you are done, press Esc. If you want to continue with another note, click again to place it, and start typing. If you want to place the same note as the first one again, the text is already there, so click a second time.

Making use of fonts

SolidWorks can make use of any TrueType fonts that Windows will accept. This includes symbol, non-English, and Wingding fonts. SolidWorks does not use true monofonts like AutoCAD because they do not have width information and thus do not print like fonts with widths. Some AutoCAD monofont look-alike fonts are installed with SolidWorks that do have a very narrow width, and are shaped like some of the monofonts.

In the Customize dialog box (Tools⇒Customize), the Fonts toolbar displays as the Formatting toolbar. The Formatting toolbar also appears in the graphics area immediately over your text every time you either insert a new note or edit an existing note, unless the toolbar is already docked somewhere. The Formatting toolbar is shown in Figure 16.1.

FIGURE 16.1

The Formatting toolbar

Using text boxes and wrapping

Text boxes enable you to limit the size, particularly the width, that a note can occupy. This enables notes to wrap in tight spaces on title or revision blocks, as well as other places.

You can size text boxes immediately after placement, even while they are blank; the text then wraps to fit the box width as you type it. The text box expands downward automatically. Blank text boxes can be left on the drawing to provide a placeholder for future text. The blank text box has a rectangular border that contains an X, both of which are removed when you add text. If spaces are added to a text box, the text box becomes invisible, although you can select it if you know where it is. When you move the cursor over the text box, the cursor displays the note symbol.

While typing a note, it is not possible to make the note box smaller using the middle handle on the right end of the box; you can only stretch it larger. Using any corner handle, as shown in Figure 16.2, you can make the box taller, wider, or narrower. The note box will not resize smaller if the text string it contains does not contain spaces.

FIGURE 16.2

Resizing a text box using the lower-right corner handle

If a custom property value is used to populate a note and you select the Annotation Link Variables option in the Views dialog box, when you activate the text box to resize it, the text value will go away and the link variable will be displayed. This makes it difficult to dynamically resize the box to fit the note, so it might be best to deselect the Annotation Link Variable option before placing and sizing notes.

Using Fit Text in notes

The Text Format panel of the Note PropertyManager, shown in Figure 16.3, contains the justification buttons for note text, but also has a Fit Text option. When the Fit Text button is depressed, changing the width of the text box changes the width of the individual characters.