3 minutes: Haochen CAD teaches you how to quickly draw special CAD symbols!

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When using the Haochen CAD drawing software to create drawings, we often need to enter special characters as well as industry-specific symbols, such as cuts, indices, and axis numbers in architecture, and diameters and tolerances in mechanics. So how can these special CAD symbols be drawn quickly? Firstly, Haochen Software provides professional software tailored for various industries, allowing you to easily create symbols that comply with industry-specific drawing standards. For example, index symbols in architectural software can be created very easily using HaoChen Cloud Architecture or HaoChen CAD Architecture 2020; they are also easy to modify and standardize. For special symbols that are not specific to any particular industry but are still commonly used, such as degrees ° and the plus/minus signs ±, how should these CAD special symbols be drawn? Control codes and Unicode strings 1. Direct input using control codes: Generally, in CAD, these special symbols are generated using control codes with two percent signs. The specific code is as follows: Here, we list the methods for entering some commonly used symbols; for the remaining symbols, you can check the Unicode strings by hovering your mouse over the character mapping table in multi-line text to know how to enter them. It’s a good idea to write down those symbols that are used frequently, so that they can be used directly later on, thereby improving the efficiency of CAD drawing. 2. Unicode strings can be entered directly; the typical format for a Unicode string is \U+****, where “****” represents a four-digit hexadecimal string. For example, the degree symbol ° can be output either as %%d or as \U+00B0. It should be noted that not all special symbols can be entered using control codes; Unicode strings cover a wider range. Moreover, there are some special characters that cannot be displayed properly in certain SHX fonts (or they are not displayed as intended); for example, the three images below show how the same characters appear in different SHX fonts. Here, the editor suggests that if the CAD drawings provided by your colleague have display issues, it’s best to ask them for the font files used in those drawings; or you can use the electronic transmission feature to package the drawings and fonts together into a single compressed file. To select for insertion using multi-line text: 1) Open the CAD software, create a new drawing, and click on Text—Multi-line Text; note that it is multi-line text. 2) Open the text formatting window and click the “@” button; as shown in the figure below, click the symbol corresponding to what you want to enter, with the appropriate code following each character. 3) If the symbol you want is not available in the dropdown list under “@”, you can click “Other” at the bottom of the dropdown menu to open the character mapping table and select it for insertion. In the “Character Mapping Table”, find the symbol you want, click on it, then press the [Select] button. You can select additional symbols and click [Select] again to insert multiple symbols at once. Once all the symbols have been selected, press the [Copy] button, close the “Character Mapping Table”, and then use the “Paste” command (Ctrl+V) in the text editing field. Of course, some designer friends will use Word to create special symbols and then paste them into the HaoChen CAD drawing software, or they can use an input method to enter them; as long as the display effect is normal, it’s all fine. This article is reprinted from the official WeChat account of Haochen CAD. If there is any infringement, please contact us for removal!