Adjusting Size and Placement of Annotations

The placement and size of any annotation can be edited at any time. However, imported annotations will be converted when you do so. It should be noted that changing the properties of any annotation including placement and scale will convert the annotation from the CAD format to the NRK format annotations. This may change the look and number of leader lines of these annotations to some degree.

The size and position of an annotation is saved in the annotation properties. While the properties of an annotation is open the graphically placement can be edited by dragging the annotation to a new location in the graphics window. There is also a numeric control with- in the properties dialog to adjust the size of the annotation text.

Global Adjustments

Global adjustments to annotation placement and text size can be made by using the utilities available through the Annotation Right- click Menu. these functions will convert Cad imported annotations to NRK annotations which will graphically change to some degree.

Using the Drag Annotations Tool.

Annotations can either use the “Current View” which dynamically rotates to face the screen at all times or can be constrained such that the annotation text is placed on a plane.

The hardest part of position an annotation in 3D space is controlling the depth. Your annotation may appear perfect but, when rotated 90 degrees, be far from the part because of this view plane issue. To ad- dress this the Placement Reference Object selection was added. This al- lows you to constrain the placement of an annotation to a plane and position it while remaining in Current View (screen oriented) display.

This is done as follows:

  1. Select an object defining a direction, such as the World frame.

  2. Select a reference plane such as XY-plane.

  3. Position any annotations you would like in the graphics. Do- ing so will constrain the leader lines for the selected annota- tions to be parallel to the reference plane.

Alternatively, annotations can be directly constrained to a view plane by selecting a specific view. Doing so will lock the annotation text to a plane defined by the viewing direction and the annotation an- chor point. This method works very well when combined with callout views.

GD&T Dimensional Annotations

Dimensional tolerances have greater constraints placed on them and only allow 2D placement with respect to the selected features. Right- clicking on a dimension annotation and selecting Adjust Leader Lines will bring up the following dialog.

Annotation Layout Tools in SpatialAnalyzer are demonstrated here: https://youtu.be/k87DL-8rGo8