I Cannot Attribute My Multiple Lines to Attributes

I had a call the other day about a person who was using Mtext in a Title block for their data. He would edit the data and it would word wrap properly. However he wanted to move these to Attributes these can give the object a bit more intellegence and makes pulling data much easier. However when he started using his Attributes they would not allow a second line and all of his text ran outside of the Title Block area.

Figure 1

What to do? Well there are actually some options in Attributes that will allow for this. They have not been discussed very much from what I can see so lets take a look and see how they can help.

When creating your Attribute you will see on the upper left side of the Dialog Box an option called Multiple-lines. This option will allow us to have an Attribute that has Multiple lines rather than one long line of Text. When this option is turned on another option becomes avalable in the bottom right called Boundary. This option will allow you to set a width that once reached will start a new line. the same rules for word wrap follow here. The word wrap will start a new line with a new word. So if you have "AutoCADisthegreatestprogramever" you will not get a word wrap. however if you had "AutoCAD is the Greatest program ever" then word wrap will evaluate for each word. If you are using fields then you must put in the data before you turn on Multiple Line or the field will gray out.

Figure 2

Simply Check Multiple Lines and set the Boundary to the distance you would like it to word wrap at and your Attributes can now act more like standard text while retaining the intelligence of an Attribute.

Figure 3

The Attribute at the top in Figure 3 is using Multiple Lines and the Attribute at the bottom is not using Multiple-line.

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Comments

[Randy Spear]

I have multiline attributes with SSM fields in my dwts. When I add a new layout to the sheet set, the fields don't update until I open the attribute editor and then open the field editor. Any way around this issue?

FIELDEVAL=31

[Jeff]

Depends on how this is done if they are a block inside of a block this could be an issue as well but SSM is a bit of a different animal just the way it works and does things in the back ground are a bit different most of the time it has not really tied all these together until we get this done but you may try to create it open it and then close and open back up sometimes these will update at this time due to the process of having the file created and then opening (ie not SSM created but created opened so it is seen by the SSM and saved and reopened so it sees all the connection features at one time)